RN HEROES PROJECT
A Multimedia Record of Ordinary Nurses Doing Extraordinary Things...
The devastating earthquake that rocked Haiti, the disaster is fading from the daily news cycle. But to the courageous and dedicated volunteers and relief workers who have been assisting with the healing mission, the mission is far from over, and will continue. As the international president of Doctors Without Borders noted recently, "It’s going to be a very long recovery."
Registered nurses who volunteered with the National Nurses United’s Registered Nurse Response Network have been part of the healing and recovery process, and are reporting back with compelling accounts of their experiences. Following are some first hand reports in their own words below:
Current RN Heroes & Features:
NEW: Huffington Post Blog By: Debora Burger, NNU Co-President
Donna Smith Explains RN Heroes | Ashley Forsberg, RN | Haiti Relief Video | Lauren Aichele, RN
National Nurse Magazine Feature | Kathy Reardon, RN | Haiti Relief Flickr Slide Show
NEW: NurseTalk Radio Features RN Heroes segments for iTunes and MP3 players
National Excerpts from Haiti Relief RNs | NEW: Hear The New RN Heroes PSA
Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer
Nurses from RNRN traveled to Sacre Coeur Hosptial in Haiti to provide direct relief to those still suffering from the aftereffects of the Haiti earthquake. Click the play button above to view our newest slide show.
How to Help Our Haiti Relief Effort Ongoing:
When the terrible earthquake struck Haiti, followed by a flood of media attention and global concern, RNs in America knew one thing: nurses would be in Haiti long after the TV cameras left. And this is exactly what has come to be. A team of registered nurse volunteers with National Nurses United, from California, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Texas were the latest, departing for Haiti last Friday to serve a nine-day deployment at Hopital Sacre Coeur. The deployments are expected to continue for several months, reflecting the commitment of nurses to these patients.
Hopital Sacre Coeur (HSC), a 73-bed facility, is the largest private hospital in the north of Haiti, located 80 miles north of Port-au-Prince in the town of Milot. Before the earthquake, the hospital typically had 56,000 patients a year and people would often travel miles to receive care. After the disaster, tent hospitals were set up for the many additional patients as well as for discharged patients who had no housing. More
RNs' Readiness…and Haiti's Need
A Summary of the RN Heroes Program
by: Donna Smith
(As part of our RN Heroes project—and with the goal of honoring the extraordinary nurses who are literally everywhere--Donna Smith, a community organizer with NNU, shared these thoughts about nurses and the Haiti earthquake. As Donna points out…nurses and the care they provide is universally needed.)
How does the world react when disaster rolls unmercifully across the fabric of our day-to-day lives? For governments and for relief agencies and for well-meaning people all over the globe, those reactions can be steeped in political and economic considerations as the flow of aid and of money for disaster relief is tamped up to meet the current global disaster call.
But for registered nurses of National Nurses United, the news of an immediate medical emergency caused by natural disaster is not met with any diplomatic delay or conflict about what is needed by those who are suffering. Nurses are needed. Nursing care is needed. In an instant, RNs know that their professional training and skill could begin helping the patients who need care before most of the world wraps its responses around the horrific details.
Nurses do not seek out the situations in which heroes are identified and sometimes glorified; nurses offer themselves into the service of patient care whether that care is needed in the rubble of Haiti, the devastation of Sri Lanka after the tsunami or the flood-damaged Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans after Katrina. More
Ashley Forsberg, RN, Helps Haiti Earthquake Victims
Ashley Forsberg, RN, a medical/surgical nurse from Sparrow Hospital in Lansing, Michigan is brimming with emotion from her relief work in Haiti on the Navy ship USNS Comfort. She tells of bonds made with patients and new teammates. “And it truly was a team,” she says. “One thing you learn on the ship is that everything you do makes a difference to your teammates. How much water you use during your shower. How much water you drink. How noisy you are in your quarters when people working other shifts are trying to sleep.”
For Forsberg, who spent a week and a half aboard the Comfort as a volunteer with National Nurses United’s Registered Nurse Response Network, shipboard life was full of amazing experiences. “We had drills to go through – fire drills, abandon-ship drills and then falling out for muster to make sure everyone was on the ship. Every morning reveille would sound at 6:00 am whether you worked the night shift or not! There was always sound – machinery humming, water running, PA announcements.” More
Feature VIDEO on RNRN Haiti Relief Effor
Watch and share this compelling RN Heroes featured video! A look at the experience of National Nurses United (NNU) RNs who volunteered to aid Haitians on the USNS Comfort after the devastating January earthquake. Footage courtesy of Tim Thomas, RN. Photos courtesy of RNs who served on the USNS Comfort.
Lauren Aichele, RN, Helps Haiti Earthquake Victims
February 2, 2010 was the beginning of what would be the most exciting and rewarding experience that I have ever been involved in.
A little over 24 hours prior, I had learned of my deployment to Haiti. I felt so honored to be among the National Nurses United/RN Response Network nurses to be a part of Operation Unified Response onboard the USNS Comfort Navy Ship.
I quickly packed my bags, filled out paperwork, got the necessary injections, and left San Francisco at 6 a.m. that morning to head to Jacksonville, Fl. This is where I met the incredible people with whom I would share this experience. We were greeted by the United States Navy, and from day 1 until the end, they could not have been more gracious and grateful. They went above and beyond to make sure everything was perfect for us.
After a briefing from the Navy the next morning, we flew from the Naval Base in Jacksonville to Port au Prince, where we arrived at dark. The town looked horrifying with people living in the streets and in whatever shelter they could throw together with sheets, boxes, etc. Rubble littered the dark streets and there were small fires everywhere, which may have been used for cooking or just to have some light. The scene was surreal and quite unsettling, and I was happy our bus was guarded at the door with U.S. military staff with guns.
We arrived at the ship by small boats. We were then assigned a place to sleep, filled out paperwork, had a late dinner and got to bed in time for a few hours of sleep before getting up to start our first full day. After breakfast and an orientation we started working! More
NEW National Nurse Magazine features article on Haiti Relief
Helping Haiti - When Haiti’s earthquake survivors needed medical attention, nurses from across the United States answered the call. BY FELICIA MELLO AND GERARD BROGAN, RN
It was sweltering inside the maternity tent at the improvised hospital in Haiti’s earthquake-ravaged capital, and beads of perspiration were collecting on the young mother’s forehead. Cecelia Williams, RN, reached out and began to wipe her face with a cloth. “She looked into my eyes and it was like I was seeing my own daughter lying there,” said Williams, an oncology/medical-surgical nurse from Pennsylvania. It was then that Williams broke down—overwhelmed by round-the-clock shifts tending maggot-infested wounds and the sight of so many mothers giving birth with no privacy, their babies left unwashed. “The tears were just going down my face. I felt so hopeless,” Williams recalled.
Read and share the full article in a printer-friendly PDF here | Get the full magazine
Kathy Reardon, RN, Helps Haiti Earthquake Victims
Massachusetts RN Kathy Reardon was stationed at a hospital in Milot, a small town 70 miles from the capital, where she wrote in her diary every day.
|
Patient with Kathy Reardon, RN
|
Friday, January 29, 2010
Puddle jumper to Cap Haitien. A little nerve-wracking when they have the instruction manual out! It took 45 minutes to arrive at the “hospital,” over dirt roads with people in the streets, living in shacks on the side of the road. All Pam and I kept saying was “I can’t believe we’re doing this.” I think we’ve been saying this since we got the call to come.
We saw the soccer field where the choppers land, and where all the patients are housed. What a sight—people in every corner of these large rooms. It was a school house. The hospital has taken it over for patients. They all have various injuries—some with one limb missing, some with both legs missing, some paraplegics with huge open sacral wounds like you’ve never seen sleeping on mattresses on the floor.
They try and do three rounds a day for about 60 to 65 patients. Some can be discharged but there’s nowhere for them to go—and the family members stay and sleep there too. Unbelievable. An exhausting, shell-shocking, eye-opening day.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Today was a very long day—we worked from 8:30 a.m. to 12 midnight. We heard choppers overhead all day. More
Haiti Relief Flicker Slide Show Says it All...(push the play button in the lower right corner)
Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer
NurseTalk Radio Features RN Heroes segments for iTunes and MP3 players
CNA/NNU's Donna Smith joins the hosts of Nurse Talk, Casey Hobbs and Dan Grady to introduce the all new "RN Heroes" Project. Donna gives a warm introduction to the project and is followed up by Massachusetts RN, Kathy Reardon. Kathy speaks with humility about her time and service in Haiti and shares some very moving comments about her experience. When asked if she thought of herself as a hero, she replies, "not at all, I just did my job." In the coming months Nurse Talk Radio will talk with "RN Heroes" and share their inspiring stories. Thanks to the RN Response Network, CNA and National Nurses United for acknowledging the heroes that walk among us.
Hear the Radio Segment on RN Heroes:
National Excerpts from Haiti Relief RNs
From California: Tim Thomas, RN, “The whole place is a hill of rubble,” he said. “It’s really difficult to get your brain around that level of catastrophe. Where in the world have 200,000 people died in one spot at one time?” The volunteer civilian nurses augmented the Navy team members on the Naval ship USNS Comfort, some of whom had been working without a break for three days. “When we arrived, nurses had been working around the clock,” he said. “I felt totally lucky,” he said. When he arrived aboard the boat, there were 200 people waiting for some type of surgical procedure, and in one month, the team performed 800 surgeries, Thomas said. “In the two weeks I was there, I saw one sunset,” he said.
Chico, CA: An NNU member from Chico, California describes his life-changing experience, and the unforgettable memories, he earned while saving lives with the USNS Comfort team off the coast of Haiti. As the article notes, Darrell Daughtry summed it up this way: "If you're agreeable to that kind of work, and you don't mind long hours and no pay, it's a good thing." He clearly was agreeable to that…making him an RN Hero. More
Modesto, CA: Marti Smith—a Modesto nurse and RN Hero—was profiled in her hometown newspaper when she returned from her work on the USNS Comfort. The article read in part: ” The ship's emergency room received 40 to 50 patients on busy days, all of them with serious injuries or illness. The nurses prepped them for surgery or admitted them to the open hospital ward, where patients rested in bunk beds. Smith worked 12-hour shifts for nine of the 10 days, with one day off, but had no complaints. The ship's military staff was exhausted from working 21 days straight. The nurses saw incredible cases of healing and forged bonds with Haitian patients that will stay with them for life, Smith said.” More
From Minnesota: “As nurses, it’s in our DNA to help,” says Minnesota Nurses Association President Linda Hamilton. “We don’t know any other way to operate. It doesn’t matter if it’s in Hastings or Haiti – our nurses want to be where they are needed.”
MNA partnered with its national union, National Nurses United. After weeks of logistical efforts and negotiations, NNU recently secured a formal agreement with the U.S. Navy to transport and place nurses on the ground in Haiti.
Julie Pearce, RN, who did not go along with a formal NNU deployment, writes from her own blog: “Another highlight of my day was passing by one of the tents only to see this young girl sitting on the edge of her bed, singing to herself and crying. She was alone and was coping with a rather fresh leg amputation. I can only imagine what was going through her head, what kind of loss she's experienced in the last month, and how she must envision her future to be. I sat down beside her quietly, put my arms around her and just rocked her. She continued to cry and sing softly. I cracked a little big here. Her pain chiseled away at the wall I'm having to reinforce around my heart to stay strong. I cried with her for a bit, we sat in quietness, and although we could not speak in another's language, the message of compassion and empathy were clear.”
From Michigan: “It’s been four weeks and Haiti is becoming ‘out of sight, out of mind.’ The people of Haiti are going to need ongoing care for a long time, both physical and mental. We can’t just patch it up and put a Band-aid on it.” This report is from, as one nurse wrote, “one of our own, a med/surg nurse from Sparrow Hospital; she was both thrilled and scared. She is worried, however. The monsoon season will be starting soon and she worries about water contamination and the spread of typhoid and malaria. ‘Haiti is a whole different thought culture,’ she said. ‘Everything I do must be on a critical path that helps me determine, ‘Can I do this?’ “
Please share www.RNheroes.org with nurses everywhere!
