Sweden Day 16: Sunderby Sjukhus

19 April 2010
Lulea, Sweden
Sunderby Sjukhus (Hospital)

This morning, Katarina picked us up from the hotel to take us for our first day of rotation here in Lulea at the local hospital. This hospital serves the whole area and is about 380 beds. It's a very large hospital, probably around the size of Methodist University, I'd say. In the morning, we talked with our preceptor for the day Eva. She told us about the hospital and took us down to the Bunker room which is a common storeroom for drugs that are not used frequently on many of the wards. Certain drugs are being moved from the floors to this room in order to help the hospital save money.

After seeing and discussing the Bunker room, we went with Christoffer to the Intensive Care Ward where we did the ward stock order for the ICU. This is actually a new endeavor by pharmacy services. Previously, nurses were responsible for ordering all drugs for the wards which are kept in a medication room on the floor. There were two main problems with this practice. For one, ordering took approximately 900 hours per year of nursing time. The other problem was that too many drugs were being ordered for the floors, and sometimes the wrong drug would be ordered (brand vs. generic). Thus, pharmacy services has slowly taken over ordering for most of the wards in the hospital. Wards are checked at different frequencies based on the amount of drugs used during the week. The ICU is checked more frequently than other wards because it is a high use area. After the order is processed, technicians fill and deliver the drugs to the ward room.

This is a big difference from pharmacy in the US. In Sweden's hospitals (or at least this one), the nurses are responsible for going into the medication room and choosing the correct drug and administering it to the patient, whereas in the US the pharmacy dispenses nearly all medications directly from the pharmacy or via a machine on the ward which is stocked by the pharmacy. Swedish hospital pharmacies have nothing to do with approval of medications written by the doctors. Nurses are also responsible for drawing up and diluting medications for administration.


We ate lunch in the cafeteria. The fish was pretty tasty, and the potatoes were excellent. We tried some dessert later, but these Sjukhus konditori folks could use a few lessons from the ones in Stockholm, for sure =/












Just because it looks like a princess cake doesn't mean it tastes like a princess cake, as Josh sadly found out. He wound up with some kind of banana mint concoction...but at least it was as aesthetically pleasing =)






Thankfully, I got some chocolate milk (in a non-yogurt consistency) that made it worthwhile.






A little something different about the hospitals in Sweden is that you can actually purchase Diabetes from the cafeteria ;) Sadly, there are no refunds =/










After lunch, we learned a little bit about clinical trials that were going on at the hospital as well as the process in Sweden. Then we spent more time with Christoffer where he told us about the interactions that pharmacists have with dialysis patients in counseling and reconciling medications when the patients come to the hospital for dialysis. The pharmacists also do a medication reconciliation for elderly patients.

For our last event of the day, we talked about the home-based patient records which allow nursing home and home-based patients to have their medication records interfaced with hospital records. This is a great step towards patient safety.

When I got back home, I took a swing through the gym here just to check things out, and it might be a little hardcore for me. It's a pretty big place, but there are so many people working out that it feels small. And you can tell that it's a popular place because it actually smells like sweat...but maybe I'm just making excuses =) I'm hoping it'll clear out later on in the evening! Keep your fingers crossed!


There may not be very much to do here in the evenings, but the sky is beautiful and lasts most of the day because we are so far north. This is a picture I took from the bus on the way back to the hotel from the hospital. That's actually a harbor out there that is iced over--the North Harbor of Lulea. In winter (more winter than now), there are actually roads on the ice so that you can drive across it. It would be unsafe for us try this now.