Shanghai sitting

 I am sitting in my hotel room in Shanghai – the fog/smog is thick, the is air damp and very warm. It is a little after 5am and the streets are busy – traffic on the road, bikes and scooters by the dozen, people scurrying by going about their business. The city is a forest of tall apartment blocks stretching as far as the eye can see but throughout the city are parks. Not little recreation grounds but miniature Botanical gardens teeming with plants and trees of every variety. These provide the oasis in a hectic city and they are filled with people dancing, doing Tai Chi, singing, walking, energetically talking and pensively playing chess.
I am here to work with members of the Faculty of Nursing at the JaiTong University to develop a cancer nursing course and to embed cancer nursing into their Bachelor of Nursing programme, and to discuss research collaboration, all of which is very exciting. I have yet to see the clinical area but understand from the teachers that nurses here do not have safe handling guidelines nor access to PPE. This will be a challenge in teaching best practice but gives me food for thought sitting in my comfortable Sydney clinical environment. I hope that we can encourage cancer nurses from here to attend conferences and find other ways to discuss and share ideas and practice with nurses from all parts of the globe but this will take time I think.