First sauna and swim in lake!

I have had a really great day today. I walked to the hospital from my flat  

this is the road I walk up, passing the Baptist church

The Hospital is through the trees here

This is the main entrance

and this is the entrance and the main tower block

I then went to meet Pirjo in her office

Trip to the lake and sauna - see below!

The admin office staff by the lake

The Hospital is through the trees here (tried to move it but jumped back so given up now!)

The Acuta - A&E department

Pia and Penny about to go in the lake

I really need to find a template to put these on properly - did it much better yesterday! But too tired now to play around any more! 

This is all out of synch with the photos but hopefully you'll get the drift!

I spent the day with Raiija from HR - we discussed the department and personnel. They have problems recruiting doctors and nurses, especially for certain areas such as psychiatry and neurosciences. They have developed a very successful leadership programme for their staff. Their HR department also organises training and I met with Katja to look at this in more depth. The HR cover the whole Pirkanmaa district so this includes TAYS hospital where I am based but also the other regional hospitals. They have some mandatory training and a large programme of other training courses. They offer about 400 training courses a year for 17,000 people. They also have about 700-800 video conferences a year too. One of the main focuses for Katja is the LOVE training. This is for nurses to enable them to dispense medications. On qualifying they have to do an on-line test to ensure that they are safe to dispense medications and get their licence to do this. They then have to update every 5 years repeating the on-line training test to ensure that they have maintained their competence. 

Katja is also developing a shared training programme for medical and nursing students but this is in the very early planning stages at the moment. It has sign-up from both professions and she hopes that it will start in about 4 years. At Tampere they currently have about 3,500 nursing students each year and 120 medics.

I also met with Outi who has been the project lead for their e-Resepti.This is a national project to introduce e-prescriptions. This will replace paper prescriptions. Instead the data is sent from the health centre or secondary care to the central database KELA and then pharmacists can access this when the patient comes to them for their prescription. This is a government initiative and everywhere must be doing this by 2013 (2014 for private healthcare). Interestingly they do not routinely issue discharge medications - only urgent supplies until the patient can obtain their medicines from the pharmacist. Some medications are free of charge - such as diabetic medications; others require patients to pay 25% of the cost, such as anti-hypertensive (blood pressure) tablets; and others 50% of the cost. The hospitals, health centres and pharmacists have all had to meet the costs themselves of the IT upgrade needed for this.

They are also working with KELA to develop a national archive whereby all patient records will be shared provided the patients gives their consent. It will be very interesting to see if they can achieve this.

Having finished my meetings Pirjo asked me if I would like to go for a sauna and maybe a swim in the lake. How could I refuse? This is such a Finnish tradition. I did have my reservations about the sauna - I do not like getting sweaty and I was very unsure about the whole nudity thing! However, when in Finland.... So I collected my swimming costume and we joined her team at the lake. There was food - BBQ smoked sausage and sweetcorn which was delicious. The others had been there for most of the afternoon and so had done their saunas and swims. However, Pia offered to take me into the sauna. It was 85'C, but was actually quite pleasant. She put plenty of water on the electric coals. I soon got over my reservations about being naked and relaxed and enjoyed sitting and chatting. We then put on our costumes and went to the lake. She warned me it was about 6'C so I must only go in swim a couple of strokes and then get out - it was exhilarating. It was also very cold but because we were only in for a short time I did not really have chance to get cold. We then did the shower and sauna again - it was brilliant. 

Now I am tired - hence my blog is rather disjointed and disorganised and I had to message Helen as I got in a muddle uploading my photos. I think I will sleep very well tonight!

Pia and Penny after swim!