Several teams of students from the UCIrvine School of Medicine have departed on travels around the world bringing iPads and ultrasound to the hospitals and clinics they visit.
For the past two years, students at UCIrvine have received iPads during their white coat ceremony as they enter their first year. Though they have become comfortable with iPads during their academic studies, there is a lot more they are learning about them as they travel to their global destinations which include China/Vietnam, Nicaragua, Peru and Australia.
The students prepared for their trips with these "must have" gadgets for traveling abroad and have taken advantage of useful translation apps such as Google Translate and MediBabble. In addition, the students are using apps like the Sanford Guide to look up infectious diseases and Inkling's Essential Clinical Anatomy to point to images when the ability to communicate medical terms in a language like Chinese proves challenging.
Ultrasound is another technology that UCIrvine students gain experience from their first year of medical school onwards. The team of students in Nicaragua are using this knowledge to teach physicians and students about ultrasound in the hopes of better understanding and managing the chronic kidney disease of local sugarcane farmers. Undoubtedly, these global missions are highlighted by the unplanned experiences students encounter such as performing a fetal ultrasound for a pregnant worker at the students' hostel who had never seen her baby's pulsating heart.
The students are sharing their adventures at the UCI iMedEd International blog site where you can continue to follow them this summer:
http://sites.uci.edu/imededinternational/
Also, here is a nice piece by the Stanford School of Medicine highlighting this work by the UCIrvine students:
