MN med student's suggestions on religious-appropriate OR garb become Mayo standard
ROCHESTER, Minn. -- She's not even a doctor yet, but a young Minneapolis woman is already a changemaker in hospitals all over the country. She's turned one really bad day at medical school into something great.
The OR of the top hospital in the country is a place southwest Minneapolis native Rewan Abdelwahab has dreamed of since she was in undergrad at Harvard University.
"I fell in love with the sciences, started volunteering in a clinic in Chelsea, and from there immersed myself in the pre-med track," she said.
It was full steam ahead at Mayo Medical School when she hit a bump on her road to success.
"They had no guidance on how I could cover my hijab, this head scarf that I wear on my head for religious purposes, and really had no PPP that I could wear that was both comfortable for me and safe for the patient," she said.
When she was supposed to scrub in, she felt left out.
"I had to cope with that shock of exposing my arms in front of a group of people for what had been ten years for me. So it was very significant," she said.
She realized her devotion to medicine was colliding with her commitment to modesty. Her mentor noticed too.
"I was struck by how much feeling you had about what had happened to you and how painful it was," Dr. J. Michael Bostwick said.
Bostwick helped her publish an article explaining the problem and the solutions she had gathered from health professionals in a variety of faiths -- the turbines worn by Sikhs, the kippahs worn by practicing Orthodox Jews, and so on.
"The awareness needs to be raised that there are work arounds, that you don't have to just give up," Bostwick said.
They figured instead of just caps, they could wear orthopedic hoods, and they could scrub in privately. It took off; they were published in a medical journal and a national surgical nurses' organization adopted the standards.
"It was mind-blowing, I was a first-year medical student and it had grown to an extent I really truly never thought would be possible," Abdelwahab said.
The Mayo Clinic is now using her suggested OR standards.
Abdelwahab is still trying to decide if she will go into surgical medicine or clinical medicine.
