exchanges
SCOPE EXCHANGE IN SWITZERLAND Text:
Giuseppe Norcia | University of Sassari, Italy
It all began in December 2020 when I decided to select Switzerland as destination for my clerkship project. At the beginning I chose Switzerland because I was fascinated by the possibility to use my mother tongue, Italian, to communicate during my experience, This desire came from the fact that before Switzerland I have been to Turkey, and honestly, it has been very difficult to interact with the patients because of the language barrier. In addition, I was so curious about Switzerland as a country, because even though it’s very near to Italy I had never been there. Since I come from an island, I was looking forward to seeing this new mountain environment. Moreover, I chose Switzerland because in this context of pandemic I wanted to be sure that the epidemiologic conditions of the country allowed me to go, because in other countries the situation related to COVID-19 made clerkship impossible.
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Then I arrived in Switzerland in October 2021 and me and my Italian friend have been welcomed by the LEO and our contact person. They were all so kind with us and helped us with all our problems. First of all they provided us with a SIM card with internet, then they provided us with a transport card which was very useful for us and we used it a lot to travel all around Switzerland by train. After that we went out for a drink in the city centre and they gave us many advice about what to see, where to go and so on. At the beginning I selected many departments such as cardiology and pneumology but none of them were available for me, so I was assigned to intensive care unit. That was a huge stroke of luck for me since in intensive care I had the possibility to deepen my knowledge about both cardiology and pneumology too.
