In The Spotlight

Nursing – Italian Style!

Nursing – Italian Style!

Senior Katie McCormick recalls the adventure of a lifetime began on a cold January afternoon, sitting across from Jacqueline Lamb, PhD, (MN ’75).

Lamb interviewed McCormick and each of the other students who wanted to participate  in a month long, three-credit course entitled Health Care Delivery in Sicily at IsMeTT (L'Istituto Mediterraneo per i Trapianti e Terapie ad Alta Specializzazione) in Palermo, Sicily. The goal of the course is to expose students to a foreign culture and to compare culture and health care delivery in Palermo, Sicily and the United States.

“Dr. Lamb was interviewing all eight of us,” says McCormick. “It was clear she knew how to evaluate our ability to work as a group and to be good ambassadors for the school and the profession.”

The students met as a group  at least once a week as a part of a required Global Health course during the 2007 winter term to prepare for the trip by looking at culture and how it impacts health care, differences in nurse education, and differences in health care issues and delivery in a variety of countries. In addition, they met frequently with Dr. Lamb to prepare them for the experience in Sicily. They learned as much basic Italian as possible during this time plus how to communicate with people whose first language isn’t English. Lamb also invited the students to her home to meet informally with the students from the previous year who shared their perspectives.

The students were struck by differences between Italian and American professional practice. For instance, upon meeting nursing students from the Civico Hospital School of Nursing, McCormick and her colleagues were all astonished to hear that when they are not in clinical, they are in class from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., Monday through Saturday. However, the Italian students break from all schoolwork from noon until 3 p.m., reflecting the traditional culture of Sicily.

The three year nursing curriculum differs from that at the University of Pittsburgh in a number of ways. The Sicilian students, for instance, are not taught to do “head to toe” assessments as are students in this country. Faculty are not with them when they move to the hospital clinical units; they report to the head nurse. Many classes are taught by physicians, not nurses, and nurses, in general, have less clinical decision-making power in Italian hospitals. While not a curriculum difference, the students noticed right away male nurses are common as nursing provides job opportunities.

The students observed “Italian style” practices within a general hospital setting as they toured portions of Civico Hospital, part of the National Healthcare System, the norm for hospitals in Italy. While medical procedures were largely familiar in the emergency medicine response center and hospice units they toured, many of the administrative and managerial challenges were new to them because of the contrast between the Italian public medical system and the typical American private health care delivery system model.

The majority of the students’ experiences took place at IsMeTT, which was founded to meet the need for a specialized transplant hospital in the Mediterranean region and is run on the American model but within the National Healthcare System. A partnership between the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, the Cervello and Civico hospitals in Palermo, and the Sicilian regional government, IsMeTT serves patients who had been traveling extensive distances for transplant and other specialized procedures such as dialysis and interventional radiology.

And what were McCormick’s conclusions after a month? “As I reflect upon my time in Palermo, I realize how much I grew personally and professionally. I found I could function in a foreign country among strangers as long as I had a map and my translator book. I learned a lot about myself and I made some wonderful friends in the process, and I certainly learned that there is more than one way to do just about anything,” she says. “I would recommend everyone spend at least a month overseas if given the chance. It is a remarkable way to learn about another culture and about yourself, and to consider the many blessings you never knew you possessed.”