Inspired by his grandfather, a physician beloved for giving up a lucrative position in India for service-oriented work, Gney Mehta is spending a month in Guadalajara doing an “elective” at the Cruz Verde (Green Cross) in Zapopan, a placement designed to improve skills not covered in his core courses at the Cardiff University School of Medicine in Wales, located about three hours due west of London.
From his temporary home with a host family in the vibrant area near the towering Expiatorio church and adjacent plaza, the University of Guadalajara and Avenida Chapultepec, Mehta says Guadalajara “has risen far above my expectations. I’m mesmerized by the people, the beautiful structures, the growth, the construction, the art, the music. There’s a film festival going on, there is chess and dance classes in the street (on Sundays).”
Mehta arranged to come to Guadalajara through an intermediary, Global Medical Projects. A final-year medical student whose parents moved to the United Kingdom many years ago and now reside near Cardiff, he was speaking during a respite from demanding workdays filled with treating trauma in Cruz Verde clinics and ambulances.
“I’ve learned so much, more than I could have in the U.K., especially about how to manage acute trauma. It’s been very intense. It may be because of my position at Cruz Verde — I’d only done about a month of emergency medicine at home — but here I’ve seen much more trauma in a week than I’ve seen in all my experience at Cardiff. I see a lot of occupational related trauma, a man whose face was blackened when an electrical panel exploded, carpenters requiring stitches for cuts, fractures from falling from a ladder that wasn’t the right kind. A lot of it was preventable, perhaps if there had been more money or training. In the U.K., you get annoyed by all the safety checks, but here I realize how important they are.
“One of the positives is that Mexican medical students are given a lot of independence. So they’re very capable. A senior doctor is always on site though.”
Mehta said his experience in the Cruz Verde with preventable damage is related to a new field of great interest to him — patient safety.
“It’s the new bugbear in the western world, the harm caused by the medical system itself. We’re trying to raise awareness of it. A founder of the patient safety discipline pointed out that the number of avoidable deaths was equivalent to one jumbo jet crashing per week.”
Mehta, who also traveled to the Philippines on a service mission after Typhoon Haiyan, noted that doing an elective such as his at Cruz Verde, although students may jokingly refer to it as “your last big holiday before you jump into being a doctor,” is not something undertaken lightly.
“Doing an elective is required so my family paid my course fee and my food and accommodations plus transportation. They paid 1,200 pounds [US$1,704] not including transport.”
Mehta stressed that his unconventional medical experience, which was motivated in part by memories of his grandfather, Vasant Mehta, has changed him much more than a vacation.
“I was more fashion-oriented when I was younger. But after I saw the suffering in the Philippines and how happy they could be at times, even though they had very little, I realized you can be content with what you have.”
Other worthwhile parts of his time in Mexico have been professional. “I love the bond I experience here with the doctors, nurses and paramedics. Everyone works together and looks out for one another. Even though I speak broken Spanish, the doctors go the extra mile to make sure I understand what’s going on.
“I also appreciate some parts of the medical education system here very much, like the responsibility for patients that is given to medical students. At home our responsibility is only to learn.”
Mehta said that some aspects of Mexico’s medical system, such as its free civil hospitals, remind him of the British National Health Service (NHS), which he greatly admires.
“I think of health care as a basic service like water or electricity, that everyone has a right to. You pay a tax for the U.K. system, and it’s free for everyone, for every service. It’s the everyday system — it’s normal for people to use and for doctors to work in. Sure, if you want a knee transplant, you may have to wait six or eight months for it and you can get it privately if you have the money.”
Still, on some scores, he lauds Mexico as vociferously as his home country. “Mexico is probably one of the best countries I’ve been to in my life,” he emphasized. “And the food is fantastic — the spices, tacos, churros, even the pizza.
“Unfortunately, there is lots of media attention to the wrong things, like the drug cartels. At home, when I said I was going to Mexico, eyebrows shot up. But there are shootouts in other parts of the world too.”