It's Holiday time!

Hello again everyone! On Day 3 here in Australia, I am finally starting to get my bearings and am learning my way around the hospital.

Our assignment today was to work on a DUE for the drug info centre. (For you non-pharmacy people, it's basically seeing how a drug is used in a hospital.) Our project is potassium, so we went to every ward in the hospital to see what potassium they were on (oral/IV), if it was being dosed correctly, and when/if they checked a level, did it respond appropriately. So, after going to 23 wards, we have a total of...13 patients! 13 patients in this hospital getting potassium! :) Hopefully we will have greater luck next week.

I have to say I'm a big fan of tea time. We have a tea/coffee break every day at 10am-ish and 3pm-ish. I think we should institute this in America. We also had lots of discussions today as to funny Australian and American phrases in the drug info centre, including "dog's buddy" (basically, doing scut work) and trying to explain ya'll and other types of Southern phrases to them. We had quite a laugh! They also brought in several Australian desserts for us to try today!

We also were assigned two projects today, one being a journal club for you pharmacy folks, mine being on rituximab's use in renal transplant patients. Also, we have to present on a topic of our choosing to the pharmacy staff. I think I am going to present trauma pharmacy to them because there is no trauma service here.

In our dorms, we have meet some very nice people, physicians from around the world. We got some very nice compliments this am about the utility of clinical pharmacy from some students from Austria...pharmacists rarely speak to physicians in Austria they said.

It's funny...pharmacy really is the same the world over...patients still get irritated about wait times and complain about their co-pays.

Tomorrow, we leave for Sydney for an extended Easter holiday! We are going to the Blue Mountains on Thursday to bushwack (hike), visit a rainforest, see the Sydney Olympic site... (see http://www.oztrek.com.au/). We will visit the Opera House, bridge, and several museums in Sydney, and then will go to Hunter Valley for a wine country tour on Monday. We arrive back in Melbourne next Tuesday!

Hope you all have a wonderful day! G'day!

:) Leslie

Lesson 4: The microwaves in Australia are much more powerful than in the US...seeing as my oatmeal exploded in the microwave after only cooking it for 15 seconds (usually 1 min. in the US)!