Photo via Flickr / Andrew Smith

Each summer, many nurses and nursing students join humanitarian aid missions, traveling to countries where health resources are scarce in order to work in medical clinics, on surgical teams, or as part of a public health brigade to serve impoverished communities. They work alongside local health workers, often under crisis conditions. We tend to take for granted that there are no downsides to these efforts. But how do local nurses feel about working with (and usually under the supervision of) nurses from other countries?

In 2014, nurse Debbie Wilson worked in an Ebola treatment unit in Liberia. It wasn’t her first overseas medical mission. But under the particularly intense conditions of the deadly Ebola outbreak, she worked very closely with the Liberian nurses in the unit—nurses whose own family members, friends, and coworkers had died of the disease. (Read about Wilson’s experience here.) Over time, these nurses shared with Wilson their stories of positive and negative experiences working with other expatriate nurses in the center.

Since that deployment, Wilson has teamed up with her Liberian colleague Darlington S. Jallah to formally explore the working relationship between expats and local nurses. They share their findings in Exploring Working Relationships Between National and Expatriate RNs on Humanitarian Aid Missions: The Perspectives of Liberian Nurses in the June issue of AJN.

Wilson and Jallah led focus groups with Liberian […]