My Indang RHU Immersion Experience: Day 7 - Beginning of the Preparations

Today, our immersion in the Indang rural health unit was cancelled, as expected due to the stormy weather brought by tropical storm Crising. Our supervisors went ahead and provided us with our guidelines for the complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) report and presentation, so we can add that to the stuff we'll be working on while our immersion program is on hold. We were also informed that our minimum target survey answers for the CAM study was increased from 30 to 50. This was no matter for me though since I had already had 3 patients answer the survey. We were informed that if the weather conditions do not improve from Wednesday to Friday, our last resort would be for us to return to the community on July 29 to complete our interviews. Since we had the day free for us to handle the preparations for the CAM and community reports, we consulted the second-years for the task delegations. For our health teaching, some of us first-years were assigned with the printing of the tarpaulins and pamphlets that we are going to use. But since there were still some final touches that needed to be done to them, we need to wait until tomorrow to print them. 
 
 
In the meantime, we first-years conducted a meeting, going over the contents of the health teaching materials so we were all on the same page and to check for any errors. I really learned a lot about how these materials are prepared, especially after observing the attention to detail that they took, since it was noticeable that they contained a lot of statistics regarding their respective topics. As a medical student, it really reinforced the idea that as future doctors, we need to pay attention to statistics and evidence-based studies, so that our methods have data to support them and we are sure that what we are doing are actually beneficial for our patients. Once our meeting ended, I continued studying our health teaching topics of deworming and the first 1000 days until the day ended, having firm resolve that I will be able to contribute in my own way, to the health of the residents of Indang.
Location: 6V2F+483, J. Dimabiling Street, Indang, Cavite, Philippines

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