May 24, 2013. Moore, Oklahoma. One of 41 American Red Cross emergency response vehicles roams through a neighborhood affected by the storm. The Red Cross volunteers deliver food, water, and relief supplies […]
By Debra E. Williams, MSN, RN, American Red Cross full-time volunteer nurse leader in national and state positions. Her past professional experience includes work as an ARNP and CNS in several community settings in Missouri, Illinois, and Texas. This is the third in a series we are running on this blog by nurses who are or were Red Cross volunteers engaged in the disaster response following last month’s tornadoes in Oklahoma.
On Saturday, May 18, I was driving back home to Oklahoma after leading a Texas Red Cross nursing leadership conference in Houston. Before that, I had been in West, Texas, the site of the fertilizer plant explosion that killed 13 first responders and three community members and injured many more. There I’d been leading the Red Cross Health Services piece of the disaster response as manager for two weeks.
When I’m not participating in such disaster response activities in my coverage area, my usual full-time volunteer nursing leadership role with Red Cross is to recruit, train, retain, mentor, and support leadership nurses and to build partnerships internally and externally across all of Red Cross business lines—disaster, service to armed forces, blood services, international, and preparedness, health and safety. Inside Oklahoma, I support the Oklahoma State nurse liaison, Daniel Cadaret, in his efforts to recruit, train, retain, mentor, and […]
The recent tornadoes in Oklahoma are the occasion for a new series on this blog. We will be receiving and publishing updates from Red Cross nurse volunteers in the coming days. This is the second post in the series.
By Sheryl Buckner, MS, RN-BC, CNE, assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Nursing and a volunteer with the Oklahoma Medical Reserve Corps since its inception. Sheryl’s past work history includes critical care, home health, and home-based case management; she is currently co-principal investigator for Nursing Initiative Promoting Immunization Training (NIP-IT), which is a free Web site for nurses and nursing students to learn about immunizations and includes a module on mass-response immunizations.
In 2011, after devastating tornadoes struck Alabama, we ran a series of blog posts, “Dispatches from the Alabama Tornado Zone,” by Susan Hassmiller, the senior adviser for nursing at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Hassmiller went to Alabama as a Red Cross volunteer, and reported back to us with a number of moving and inspiring posts and photos. The recent tornadoes in Oklahoma are the occasion for a new series we are initiating today.
Eleanor Guzik, NP, RN, a volunteer disaster health services manager with the Red Cross, describes herself as a 74-year-old wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, traveler, serial volunteer, and a late-in-life RN who worked in critical care for 10 years, was an NP for 10, and retired in 1995. This piece by Eleanor Guzik describes her deployment and arrival in Oklahoma; subsequent posts by Guzik and other Red Cross volunteer nurses will give us glimpses of the day to day work of volunteers in Oklahoma and the people and situations they encounter.
Deployment and Arrival
