Volunteer Experience at Angkor Hospital for Children
This summer I was privileged to have the opportunity to work at Angkor Hospital for Children (AHC) as a non-medical volunteer. I had a wonderful experience volunteering at this incredible facility and had the pleasure of getting to know the kind and dedicated hospital staff. I am currently studying Physiology at McGill University and am very passionate about pursuing a career in medicine. It was very inspiring to see how well the staff at AHC work together and the amount of effort that goes into giving the children the best care possible.
My role at AHC was to help with patient data entry in the hospital’s eye clinic. The eye clinic is ran by a specialized group of nurses and doctors who immediately welcomed me into the group. In order to ensure the clinic staff could treat as many patients as possible, I assisted in making sure the patient databases were up to date. I transferred patient chart information into two different computer databases, to ensure all patient history is kept and recorded. The staff taught me about the different eye pathologies and how to categorize them in the hospital wide data base system. In addition, as part of the eye clinic team I was allowed to sit in on weekly presentations given by different team members on eye care hospital procedures which was an amazing learning experience.
In addition to helping in the eye clinic, I also assisted the research and education director on collecting cancer patient data. AHC has recently started treating cancer patients who have retinoblastoma, cancer of the eye, with chemotherapy. The goal in the future is to improve cancer patient outcomes and treat several other common childhood cancers in order to help as many patients as possible. I created a statistic spreadsheet with information from cancer patients who have been admitted to the hospital over the past several years. The goal of this data collection was to get an idea of the number of cancer patients diagnosed at the hospital and to gather the details regarding their chart history. I hope that creating this overview will help the team develop a plan for future progress regarding cancer treatment. Overall, I had an extremely memorable experience at the hospital. Over the two weeks I was in Siem Reap, I truly began to feel like part of the AHC family. I hope to return one day as a medical volunteer and will continue to support AHC from Canada through fundraising efforts and spreading awareness in my community.
Nirit Rozenberg, Canada
Summer 2014
Comments