Providing support after a local disaster.

Red Cross volunteer nurse Debby Dailey hugging her client, Janetta Sconiers. Photo by Eddie Zamora for the American Red Cross

Most people are aware of the important role nurses play in the American Red Cross, from its founding by Clara Barton—138 years ago this week—to nurses’ contributions during national and regional disasters. Yet the varied work of these nurse volunteers is often unseen by other nurses, health care providers, and the public.

Within the Red Cross, nurses hold leadership, teaching, and crisis response positions, providing crucial and sometimes long-term follow-up assistance to people who’ve been affected by disasters.

Nurses “are in an ideal position to do this work.”

Debby Dailey is a nurse and former firefighter and emergency medical technician. She currently works as a nursing clinical instructor and has been a Red Cross volunteer for 40 years, responding to national disasters and playing an important role in all aspects of Red Cross work in her region, California’s Central Valley.

This month’s In the Community column, “Advocating for Janetta,” features a rare look inside a Red Cross nurse volunteer’s daily work. In it, Dailey sequentially and engagingly recounts her day-to-day experience providing a range of assistance to a local woman with complex needs in the days and months after a house fire left her and her dog homeless.

Her story, as told in both this article and the accompanying podcast, highlights her conviction that nurses are ideally situated to manage the complicated care required by people who’ve experienced an emergency.

“After a disaster,” says Dailey, “many people just need someone to help them navigate the recovery process. . . Nurses know how to work with their colleagues to get things done.”

Tracing the footsteps of the founder of the American Red Cross.

For more about nurse involvement in the Red Cross, see AJN’s series of blog posts by nurse participants on a tour tracing the footsteps of Clara Barton in the Washington, DC–area and the work of the International Red Cross and other humanitarian and health organizations in Geneva, Switzerland. The tours took place in the fall of 2016.