From Fertilizer Plant Explosion to Tornado Response: No Rest for this Red Cross Manager

DebraRedCrossBy 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 support […]

2016-11-21T13:07:14-05:00June 21st, 2013|nursing perspective|1 Comment
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Oklahoma Tornado Dispatch #2: A Nurse With a Focus on a More Orderly Disaster Response

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.

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2016-11-21T13:07:15-05:00June 19th, 2013|nursing perspective|0 Comments
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Old Friends Among the Devastation: A Red Cross Volunteer in the Oklahoma Tornado Zone

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

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2016-11-21T13:07:16-05:00June 19th, 2013|Nursing|0 Comments
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Evidence-Based Interventions That Improve Maternal and Child Nutrition

On June 8, in London, presidents, prime ministers, businesspeople, and philanthropists came together to sign the Global Nutrition for Growth Compact. The event, hosted by the governments of Brazil and the U.K. and the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, resulted in commitments to accelerate progress toward improving nutrition for children and mothers around the globe.

In London's Hyde Park, activists laid a carpet of flower petals to represent the lives of children lost each year through malnutrition. Photo by Ismar Badzic via Flickr. In London’s Hyde Park, activists laid a carpet of flower petals to represent the lives of children lost each year through malnutrition. Photo by Ismar Badzic via Flickr.

Simultaneously, the Lancet published its second paper in a series on maternal and child nutrition. The authors of the study estimate that poor nutrition is the root cause of 45% of child deaths (3.1 million deaths among children under age five each year). 

The report builds on a similar report from 2008 and highlights the progress achieved since then. For example, the number of the world’s children who never grow to their potential height has dropped steadily over the past two decades, from more than 253 million in 1990 to 167 million in 2010.

But according to the new report, far more can still be done. The authors estimate that close to 15% of all deaths in children under five can be prevented, and at least a fifth of all stunting avoided, if […]

2016-11-21T13:07:17-05:00June 17th, 2013|Nursing|0 Comments
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Incomplete Combustion: Crohn’s, Motherhood, a New Normal

April Gibson is an essayist, poet, and ostomate. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Chicago State University. In her writing she seeks to address and renegotiate societal beliefs about motherhood, illness as alienation, beauty as a shell. Her work is published or forthcoming in Tidal Basin Review, Reverie, The New Sound, Aunt Chloe, AsUs and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago with her two sons. 

AprilGibsonTwenty-one days pass. I am a 90-pound bag of skin. Legs like peanut butter drapes thrown over femur bones, no muscle, no pronounced curve. A lover would look past me quickly in the street. I do not want these scars, or this strange body. I want to wear a red bikini. I want a kiss on my belly.

Three weeks felt like spans of small forevers. I didn’t believe my legs and arms were mine. My abdomen sunk to a cave, save for the rustling bag. My aunt hurled the word “unconscionable” on each visit, until the hospital knew her voice. My mother, grandmother, aunts, they stayed in mornings, my little brother stayed through late nights, nodding off once the drugs snatched my eyes to sleep. So many people, one could’ve mistaken my bed for a box. I can’t remember them all, or even all the days.

The nurses were there everyday, same ones. This is their wing. The doctors came […]

2016-11-21T13:07:18-05:00June 14th, 2013|Nursing, patient experience, Patients|10 Comments
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