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Interview HersenStrijd Fonds: Pascalle Wetzels
Vrijwilligerswerk loopt als een rode draad door het leven van Pascalle Wetzels; het is iets dat haar al jaren veel...Read more
‘Come to the PICU’, Esmee tells me when I meet her for the interview. The PICU (Paediatric Intensive Care Unit) at the Mosakids Children’s Hospital in Maastricht is the intensive care unit for children aged 0-18 and Esmee Jacobs’ workplace. Together with the nursing staff, fellow doctors and parents, she takes care of the children in the PICU. Esmee is a paediatrician and is also training to become a paediatric intensivist. She made the decision to follow this training programme while still training to become a paediatrician. Esmee: ‘I want to make a difference for very sick children and their families.’
“Children on a bike are very vulnerable; a helmet protects them, so put it on!”
Esmee: “I see more and more children on fat bikes on the street who are not wearing a helmet. I wonder if they realise how vulnerable they are. I want to prevent more kids from being brought in here with brain injuries, so when I heard about the national initiative to track for a week how many adults with injuries from e-bikes/fat bikes are being brought into the emergency room, I approached my colleague Marcel Aries, a neurologist-intensivist. I asked him if we as a paediatric intensive care unit (PICU) could join this initiative and do our bit to promote helmet use. He thought it was a good idea.”
Esmee continues: “You can be as careful as you like, but still. It can happen in a fraction of a second. It can have very serious consequences if you fall or are hit at high speed without a helmet, on a fat bike or bicycle. Think of permanent head or brain injury that prevents you from taking advantage of all the opportunities in your life. I don’t have exact figures on how many children are involved because not all children end up in the PICU; some children end up in the emergency room or paediatric ward.’ Esmee says that her work in the PICU is similar to her work in the adult ICU. ’The research by HersenStrijd is therefore very important because it allows us to help this group of children even better.”
She has one final piece of advice: ‘Realise the impact not wearing a helmet can have. It is such a shame if you cannot make the most of the life ahead of you because of an accident. Compare it to wearing a helmet when skiing. At first hardly anyone did it, but now we all wear a helmet. So… put that helmet on!
Author: Pascalle Wetzels
