Dr. Catherine DeVries
speaker
80 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Dr. Catherine DeVries’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And so having a nice small airport where you can get to know the customs people coming in and going out. The trip into the airport was pretty easy. You can go east to Asia or west to Africa or south, which is a little more hard because you had to go through Houston or someplace to get down to South America. But Salt Lake had a wonderful airport.
And beyond that, it also had a wonderful children's hospital. And, you know, Primary Children's Hospital is a fantastic, really wonderful place to work. And Salt Lake itself has a very international community. The population there has a lot of experience doing LDS missions. And so many, many people have been to a lot of different countries.
And this was not... The work I was doing wasn't seen as a hobby so much as a part of life that's accepted, respected, and also we could do fundraising.
Yeah, it was something that I had not really experienced in any city or community. I grew up in California, but in other places it's seen as a nice thing to do, but certainly not a thing that would be part of your life and career. And nobody ever questioned that in Utah. In fact, that was part of the terms of my employment. I told them that I could come, but that I would be traveling quite a bit.
Pat Cartwright, who is a pediatric urologist in Utah, had been working with me already in Honduras and Vietnam and Cuba. So I knew that Pat understood what we were doing and Ultimately, pretty nearly all members of the faculty of the University of Utah have been on IVU trips, and some of them have served on the board.
And so this has been very much a piece of the Utah academic experience, in addition to the nonprofit experience. outside experience. So it's sometimes hard to marry academics with nonprofits. They have different calendars, time schedules, and requirements for work.
You know, it's hard to know exactly about contributing to the success part. I think persistence contributes to success, whether you're a man or a woman. And I was persistent. I guess I still am kind of persistent. But I think also it is a little different voice. I think we bring to conversations a little different voice and a little different set of values and experience.
Not to say that one or the other is bad, but I'm glad that we have a better mix and balance of voices. Now at the university, we have a... I think five or six women faculty members. We just all took a photo recently at my retirement, and so it was great fun to see how many of them. But I think as an advantage goes, when I could get heard and sometimes I couldn't get my voice heard.
Then it stood out. The problem sometimes is just getting heard. And I experienced this interestingly more at the American Urological Association than I did with my own university in terms of male colleagues and getting heard. That took a little longer.
I discovered early on when I was traveling around, and as I mentioned before, we used to take everything when we would go. We would bring our own instruments, we'd bring our own equipment, cautery machines, anesthesia machines, really everything to make sure that we had what we needed in order to do the surgery that we were intending to teach and to do.
ivu has always been an educational organization we started that out to be an educational organization the motto was teach one reach many but it wasn't specifically just to do surgery and go home because that can always lead it leave a trail of disaster or maybe not disaster but if you even have one or two complications and you haven't worked with somebody else
locally to manage that and to know what to do, you haven't really helped. In fact, you can hurt and undermine the whole effort. So we have sought and intended to work with people who have wanted us to be there to teach them. So there's no point in my mind going into somebody else's
hospital home community and to work with the patients that they care for every day without respecting their position in that community and to work with them to help them provide better care for their patients. And as we do that inside hospitals, you start to learn about hospital systems.
And I think this is a thing that we rarely learn in medical school here in the States or probably anywhere else is how the system works. How do hospitals work? How are the nurses hired? It matters because the nurses are very often hired on a different system than the doctors are. So if all the nurses go on strike as a surgeon, you're toast. You can't do your work. You need to understand
how the place functions, the nurses, the doctors, the people who order the equipment and supplies, the whole system, including where the electricity comes from. Because if you're in the middle of operating and the whole room goes dark and you have no idea when the electricity is going to come back on, this was before everybody had cell phones and could just turn them on. You're toast. So
It's important to know how the whole system works and that gets into the public health part of it because public health is critical for surgery to occur. We have to have clean water. We have to have sterile process. We have to know that infectious disease is addressed and that we have not just a sterile processing of the instruments, but we learned during Ebola
that we have to have a public health approach to how the hospital runs. You know, you cannot share the bathrooms. The staff can't share bathrooms with sick patients. Otherwise, all of your staff will get Ebola too. You know, you have to have ways to sequester disease from not disease, how that's done in hospitals and how surgical surgery fits into that, especially
In low-resource countries where hospitals are very much built on old colonial styles, sometimes these are very old hospitals that were built by the former colonies, whether that was England, France, Portugal, pick your colony. They all had certain ways that they built hospitals at that time. And then the newer hospitals are sometimes built on Russian models or on American models.
where there are maybe no windows in the OR, which might be okay if you had really reliable electricity. But if you don't, then when it goes out, you're in the dark. That's where the public health part comes in, is looking at the systems, both the community systems, and that includes infrastructure, but also the baseline health status of a community.
I mean, if the kids are all undernourished, you're not going to get good outcomes. Similarly, as we all know with the fistula community, if we don't have good maternal care and we don't have good training, then you have all of these secondary problems for obstetric fistulas and that sort of thing.
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