Local nurse travels to Colombia

One Danville nurse practitioner enjoys learning from her peers.

Surgical tourism interested Kristin Eckland since she started reading about it in college. She understood Americans traveled outside the country to seek less expensive alternatives for surgeries, yet she wondered what other countries’ hospitals and care would be like.

She’s always been interested in medical sociology and the concepts of health and illness across cultures. With the nation’s “broken” health-care system on the minds of Americans and legislators, Eckland broadened her knowledge to see how other countries fare.

So Eckland, who works closely with Dr. Richard Embrey in Duke Cardiovascular Surgery of Danville, booked a trip to Cartagena, Colombia, to tour various clinics and hospitals.

“I’m just curious and I like to meet new people and I like to see how people do things,” Eckland said. “There’s this whole world that people never think about.”

From Feb. 14 through Feb. 24, Eckland visited physicians in multiple specialties in both private and public hospitals. She observed several surgeries, but a highlight was observing cardiac surgeon Dr. Christin Barbosa at work in Hospital Bocagrande.

Eckland was surprised to see the same setup in the operating room that she was used to back in Danville with one surgeon, one nurse and a team of operating room staff.

“I go 2,000 miles to see a cardiac surgery program like I am in now,” she said. “It just blew my mind.”

While doctors in Cartagena practiced similarly to doctors in the United States, Eckland noticed that the health-care system was different. It was two-tiered, with public care for patients with less money.

The public hospitals were clean and had the necessary technology and equipment, but patients might not get private rooms, Eckland said. It was less “fancy.”

“I learned more about human nature than anything else. A lot of things were the same. A lot were different,” Eckland said. “The people were the same…They all just want the best for their patients.”

That’s why Eckland became a nurse practitioner, graduating from Vanderbilt School of Nursing and moving to Danville in 2007. She entered the field of cardiac surgery because it offered the opportunity to dramatically change a person’s health and life.

Eckland hopes Americans and locals don’t take their health for granted. She would like to see each person take ownership of his or her health.

She’ll continue traveling to learn more about what can be accomplished in her field.

Eckland sees that Americans have viable alternatives outside of the country. She would like U.S. legislators to learn from others and reform the nation’s health-care system, especially as more and more Americans can’t afford health care or insurance.

“It needs practical reform, which means not just one answer. It’s not something that can be accomplished in a year,” she said. “I don’t have the answer.”

Bozick is a staff writer for the Danville Register & Bee.