Last summer, Susan Hassmiller, PhD, RN, FAAN, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Senior Adviser for Nursing, wrote an informative and thoughtful series of posts for this blog as she spent her summer vacation  retracing the steps of Florence Nightingale in England and Turkey.

Now she’s sending us dispatches from closer to home—Alabama, to be exact, which was recently devastated by a series of tornadoes. Susan has gone there to volunteer with the Red Cross and also to gather information on this crisis, and her daily on-the-go entries will be published one by one on the AJN blog home page and also collected here (the editing will be light, with the goal being to provide Susan a platform to convey the immediacy of her experiences).—Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor

Posts are listed below in the order they first appeared on the blog home page, with the latest post at the bottom:

Into the Alabama Tornado Zone: First Dispatches from a Red Cross Volunteer

‘Some Pretty Bad Things’: Dispatch #2

Dispatch #3: A Tight-Knit Community, the Red Cross ‘CSI’ Unit, Public Health Nursing

Unheeded Warnings, Last Words, the Value of a Bathtub

‘Today I Cried’: A Family’s Loyalty, a Veteran’s Lost K-9 Helper

Pay It Forward: A Meditation on Suffering, Volunteer Work, and Storytelling

Meeting Nightingale in Alabama; But Where Were the Young Nurses?

Abandonment Guilt

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