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Hutchinson News, The (Hutchinson, KS)
Posted on October 28, 2004

By   Clara Kilbourn

Yegor Borisov, a Russian official of the Yakutsk city committee on public health, named the No. 1 impression he'll carry home from his visit to the United States.

"American volunteerism," he said, speaking through an interpreter. "Everywhere we went volunteers are taking care of people. It's wonderful."

Borisov is one of a group of health care leaders from Russia who visited Hutchinson on Wednesday through the Open World Program.

They began a tour of medical-related organizations at Reins of Hope and made stops at Hospice of Reno County, Delos Smith Senior Center and Wesley Towers Retirement Community - with an added visit to the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center.

Prior to their overnight stay in Hutchinson, the delegation toured the University of Kansas School of Medicine in Wichita, where it found a "systematic" approach to teaching medicine, surgeon Petr Bronshteyn said.

Yelena Laykovskaya, a doctor of internal medicine at a regional hospital, was most interested in the contrast between private clinics and a Wichita clinic for low-income families.

"My main impression is the wonderful doctors and forces for health care for poor people," she said. "We were impressed at how great it is and give thanks for this."

Laykovskaya compared the work she does with newborns after seeing the heart care at Galachia Heart Clinic in Wichita.

"We are extending in our hospital care for heart surgery for newborn babies and patients with acute syndrome," she said.

In her region of Sverdlovsk, on the border of Europe and Asia and home to 4.5 million people, there are 15,000 doctors and 45,000 nurses.

Important to the delegation members is the welcome they have received from the people they've encountered. The deeper into the Midwest they've traveled the friendlier and more joyful are the people, they said.

"In 230 years of your country, the results are unimagined and impressionable," Vyacheslav Tarasov said. "This is not the cultural center, but we have seen true American people friendly and joyful."

Women take active roles in America and are not "locked in their little kitchens," Tarasov said.

"I think the country is in reliable women's hands, even the next president can be a woman," he said. "They are joyful and know how to have fun."

[Reprinted with Permission]

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