Helsinki - Day 2

I was almost tempted to title this "Hungover in Helsinki" but thought that might be unkind! The others had a very good time at the karaoke bar and came back quite late. There were not many of us at breakfast and when we met to go back to Orton some seemed a little fragile. Steve had a really sore throat from singing! We caught the tram back to the hospital and met up with Arto again to spend the morning on our presentation. We did not make as much headway as I would have liked - but that's my way of working. I like to get everything done and sorted as soon as possible, I think the others are more laid back and relaxed. It did make me realise that actually the focus is on what I have gained from the experience and learnt not the final presentation!

After lunch we visited the Institute of Health and Social Welfare. In 2009 they combined public health, the national research centre and health and welfare which is a great way of integrating all of these elements. There are a lot of challenges - demonstrating how to achieve a healthy and long life expectancy; reducing social inequalities, smoking and alcohol; promoting a healthy diet and exercise; improving working life productivity; improving the functional capacity of the elderly. We were informed that Finland has one of the most rapidly ageing populations in Europe. The department works with the municipalities to deliver research programmes and statistics which can then inform government policy.

We were then given a presentation about an elderly care research project which compared the care in public, private and municipality nursing homes. The results showed that where employees had greater autonomy they had increased job satisfaction and used less restraints and medications in their care. The work stress was much greater in large units where the workers felt they had high demands for giving psychosocial care, they had role ambiguity as there were not clearly defined roles and responsibilities, and they had a greater incidence of pressure ulcers. Where there was a low ratio of staff to patients they used more drugs, there was a higher incidence of reports of pain, much higher sickness levels and staff taking early retirement. The problem is implementing the findings of the research though as the municipality system does not make this easy. They do not necessarily want to pay out more money to rectify the problems.

We then went back to the hotel and collected our luggage and set off back to our places of work. It was nice to come back to Tampere. The only problem was that I had a train journey of nearly 2 hours and I was travelling alone. I had not brought my Kindle and was worried I might fall asleep. I contacted Helen and asked her to send me a message 20 minutes before my train was due into Tampere, and if she did not hear back to text me and then to phone me. It was a relaxing journey and the time passed quite quickly. Helen sent me a message and I informed her I was awake! Unfortunately my phone battery was dying and so I did not get her next message - to let her know that I was off the train. I arrived in Tampere and got off the train only to find that Dian and Lorraine had caught the same train and were now changing to go back to Jyvaskyla! I had had a booked open ticket so had got straight on my train at Helsinki. I went to the bus stop and then my other phone was going mad - it was Helen panicking that I was still on the train! I assured her I had got off and was now going back to my flat. I had a quiet, relaxing evening catching up on my blog and The Apprentice!