No Picts Here!

I flew into Baltimore last night to work the day in the area. We covered our first hospital, Johns Hopkins in Columbia, MD. Then we picked up another colleague and headed into D.C.

Our primary stop was at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Its always such an interesting place to go. Its HUGE and its so spotlessly clean and shiny. Its crazy!

When we first walked on base, they had all these tables set up on the lawn and tons of soliders were going to each table. Both of the reps I worked with are ex military (one Army and one Navy). They said they do these educational fairs that you have to go to in order to update and keep your stats current. The one that we were watching had something to do with weaponary as they had their rifles out. It looked like, disassembly and assembly. It was just weird seeing these table set up all over the lawn.

They're actually in the process of closing Walter Reed. Its actually supposed to be a benefit - its huge now, but it will increase in size.

Here's the kunundrum.... They're transfering the whole ARMY facitliy of Walter Reed to the NAVY facility at Bethesda. Both the Army and Navy will be working side by side and functioning from the same facility. Weird! The crappy thing is that, the area I work with in Sterile Processing/Decontamination is a department that needs tons of space for processing and storage. They have 2000 sets (which mean containers the size of about 3 shoeboxes put side by side - filled with instruments for a specific type of case such as a hysterectomy or a gall bladder removal. Sometimes, as specific case may have more than one set used for the same procedure, such as Orthopedic cases which can sometimes have up to 4 or 5 containers for one case!). So - the room they have all these sets stored in is HUGE - it has to be. But, moving to Bethesda, the size of the room decreases to half what they have now - AND they have to combine their sets wtih Bethesdas. Which probably means that a lot of sets will still be stored at Walter Reed and then will have to be transported to Bethesda when needed - which is not the most ideal situation at all!

Here's the other thing I learned. At hospitals, they'll combine military and civilian employees. The philosophy is that military transfer so often, that some sense of consistency needs to be there because there is so much information that needs to be retained.

The one guy that I worked with today who was in the Navy was actually a surgical tech before he was a sales rep. A good portion of his service time was, in fact, spent on the Comfort... If you go back a month or so in my blog, I have the article on the Comfort which was from the Hemispheres magazine. If you haven't read it yet, do so because its such an interesting thing!

The Comfort anchors in MD when its back in the states so, one of these days, if its there when I'm there, I'd LOVE to see it! Stay tuned :)

That was the interesting portion of my day -- the rest -- not so much. But, I did have a good day! :) I'm sitting at the airport right now waiting to get my 7:29 pm flight home!

By the way -- no picts for today as I didn't DARE try to take one on a military hospital base like Walter Reed!