This past weekend was spent in Western Denmark with DIS. Every program (mine being public health) spends a weekend in Western Denmark studying things relevant to their class. For some reason, my expectations of Western Denmark were fairly low. Perhaps it was the reaction I'd gotten from a few Copenhagen-ites whose reaction to our DIS sponsored travels to western Denmark was "Why would you ever want to go there?" And to be honest I really didn't know was there at all. Plus, since this was a DIS event, with our health-care class, I was expecting it to be all... boring and academic. (Not that I think health-care is all boring, but I really just didn't want to spend a whole weekend learning about health care while abroad.) However, the entire weekend in western Denmark was awesome! It wasn't all academic stuff, and even the parts that were academically oriented were really interesting and educational in a good way! I have a lot to say about the weekend, and I'm not really in the mood to write for two hours right now, so I'm breaking this blog entry into a couple parts, so stay tuned for parts two and three.
Last Thursday started out bright and early as we met by DIS at 6:45 in the morning. We loaded up onto our bus, took off towards the town of Svendborg, about three hours away, where we had an academic visit. This was my first time in Denmark that I had been of Zealand, the island where Copenhagen is! At the local hospital they told us about their tele-medicine project, which means that when a patient leaves the hospital, instead of having to come in to the hospital all the time for follow-appointments, the patient can video chat with the doctor. They can run tests on themselves, the results of which are automatically sent to the hospital. This was pretty neat and we even got to watch one of these video-chats as it was happening! The woman was a super-nice elderly woman with COPD who kept smiling and waving at us and telling us to smile more. That was really cool.
Our day continued in the town of Rødding (which I don't think I could pronounce properly for a million dollars) where we visited a general practitioner's office. Again, this was really cool and really showed me that having universal health care does not detract of the quality of care in any way. People in the US worry about long wait-lists. At this office, the doctors said that if someone needs it they'll be in within a few days. And even without an appointment, the GP we talked to said that if someone just shows up and their sick/hurt, they'll find a way to fit them in that day. It seems like the the doctors are really accessable as well. Every morning, from 8 to 9 the doctors spend an hour at the phones, so that patients can call and ask any medical questions they need to a doctor! Plus the office was just really really nice. The exam rooms were a lot bigger and a lot more comfortable than in the US. In the facilities, they have an x-ray machine, a paramedic with an emergency van, and an acupuncture room. One of the GPs will perform acupuncture on patients if he thinks it will help them, which he kindly demonstrated for us. He asked for volunteers out of our group, pulled out some needles and stuck them into the volunteers' hands, as shown in the photo below! Ouch! Actually, the volunteers said it didn't hurt at all, that it just felt a little strange.
The day ended as we made our way to a højskole for the night. A højskole is like a very small rural campus where college-aged students take classes, but not for credit. Only about 30 students lived on this campus, which was really pretty, although I can't ever imagine living somewhere that rural with such a small group of people. The food at the højskole was really good! It was a nice change to not have to cook for myself and to have food that wasn't spaghetti. After eating, we hung out with the kids from the højskole. Living seems like an interesting life. They sing songs together every morning; they aren't allowed to drink on weeknights, even though they're all of legal age to drink; they take classes but receive no grades. According to the principal of the højskole, about 10% of Danish kids go to a højskole after graduating high school but before college. It's a way to study new subjects without the pressure of not being good at it. It's definitely different from the US, where almost everyone goes straight to college right after high school and it's considered unusual to take time off before college. In Denmark, I've been told that almost everyone takes time off before college. It seems much more relaxed and like much less pressure on students than in America. Below, of course, are a few pictures from the højskole.
Strange tree.
Strange sculpture.
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