Nurse Volunteers

This summer, several BWH nurses are volunteering to bring their clinical expertise beyond the Nesson Pike, BWH’s ambulatory centers and community clinics. Brigham nurses are bringing their expert skills to summer camps and inner-city streets, and one nurse is off to a rural African village.

Sharon Wong, BSN, RN, NIC, 8AB, spends two weeks administering medications and bandaging cuts and scrapes for children at the New England Chinese Youth Summer Camp. She has done this for 11 years.

Paul Saavedra-Lauzon, BSN, RN, brings his clinical skills and acumen to a summer camp for inner-city children with HIV and AIDS, an annual trip he considers a welcome, week-long break from action-packed shifts in the ED.

Shannah Young, RN, will spend three weeks in a rural village in South Africa through a Boston-based organization called Sibusiso. When Young returns from her trip, she will begin a new role at BWH as a nurse practitioner in Plastic Surgery.

Young, Saavedra-Lauzon and Wong are among many BWH nurses who extend their expertise to those beyond the walls of BWH.

“We’re privileged to take care of the folks who are able to come here,” said Stephanie Ahmed, a nurse practitioner in Plastic Surgery who serves as president of the non-profit Sibusiso. “We’re privileged to practice here for our patients, and this is about extending that practice beyond here.”

BWH is known across the world for outreach efforts and bringing health care to impoverished regions of the world, and this institutional spirit of volunteerism includes many in BWH’s Department of Nursing.

“This is one aspect of being part of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and being part of the larger community and discipline of Nursing,” said Ahmed, whose resume includes more than a decade of work with patients infected with HIV. Before coming to BWH as a nurse practitioner in 2004, she had spent many years involved with clinical research at Massachusetts General Hospital and Massachusetts Institute of Technology and providing care for patients with HIV in the prison system.

This work got her involved last January with Sibusiso, which gains its name from the Zulu word for “blessings.” Sibusiso was founded by Sheila Davis, NP, and Chris Shaw, RN, both of MGH.

“We’re all volunteers,” said Ahmed, who was named Sibusiso president in June.

In Africa

Sibusiso, which was founded in 2003, has a number of initiatives in Africa underway. The organization sponsors a garden project as a way to provide fresh produce and education in a rural African village, provides HIV education for people in sub-Saharan Africa and those from there living in Boston, and Sibusiso volunteers are collecting nursing text books and applying for funds to send them to Africa.

“Here at the Brigham, we can log on from just about anywhere and have access to the latest and most current information on any disease, so many of us do not necessarily need our texts,” Ahmed said.

Sibusiso outfitted a treatment room for its rural nurse clinic in the village of Mbizana. The funds came from a grateful patient of BWH plastic surgeon Karl Heinz Breuing. Staff are heading there this summer to set up the room with basic supplies such as an exam table. Sibusiso also funds a nurse to see patients in that clinic for eight hours each week.

That’s where Shannah Young is going in July to help out with Sibusiso’s rural village nursing and “nurses caring for nurses” projects. “There is a significant need for a support network for the nurses in South Africa,” Young said. “In many cases, the working conditions there are terrible.”

The nurses caring for nurses program helps supply nurses with TB masks, gloves and even pens. “It’s amazing to think of all the little things they don’t have,” she said.

Young’s trip has a second component as part of a program called iNurse, a collaboration of the Harvard Medical Division of AIDS and the International AIDS Education and Training Center. The program is directed at training the rural clinic nurses in the administration and management of ARVs.

Camp Miracles and Magic

A little closer to home, Saavedra-Lauzon’s volunteer activities keep him instate in Hubbardston, a small town northwest of Worcester. That’s the summer home of Camp Miracles and Magic for children affected by HIV and AIDS, sponsored by Eliot Tatelman of Jordan’s Furniture. ED nurse Sandy Hutchinson, a regular at the camp, recruited Saavedra-Lauzon and Kelly Potvin, a per diem ED nurse.

“For me, it’s a time to give back and it reminds me why I went into Nursing in the first place,” Saavedra-Lauzon said. “I’m at camp, but I’m still practicing and it gives me more appreciation for the practice.”

Saavedra-Lauzon said the practice of nursing at the camp brings challenges and rewards different than those in the ED. He is able to connect with his patients and campers in a way not possible in the ED. “If the kids go swimming, we go swimming, and if the kids go roller skating, we go roller skating,” he said with a wide smile.

He also gets to see the kids grow and mature through relationships measured in years, not hours or even minutes like in the ED. “I get to see the kids grow and become counselors,” he said.

Saavedra-Lauzon’s volunteerism is not limited to his time at the summer camp. Once a month, he takes on an evening shift on the Bridge Over Troubled Waters mobile medical van. “It’s free care for anyone who walks up to it,” he said of the van, which winds its way through Boston’s poorest neighborhoods offering basic health assessments, blood pressure checks and hospital referrals when appropriate.

Saavedra-Lauzon’s spirit of community service is spreading around the ED, as NIC Deb Gayoski, RN, and Marilyn King, a department secretary, take turns sending him on his monthly van shifts with about 30 boxed lunches. “Deb and Marilyn are great. They might not be able to make it themselves, so this is how they help,” he said.

Care of Campers, Elderly

Like her ED counterpart, Sharon Wong donates her time and brings her clinical expertise to summertime camps and inner-city neighborhoods. Since 1994, Wong has served as an onsite clinician at the New England Chinese Youth Summer Camp (NECYSC) at Regis College, and this fall will mark the third year she and other BWH nurses have been volunteering to administer flu shots to elderly in Chinatown.

“I keep going back to the summer camp for the children,” Wong said. Her children attended the camp and served as counselors. “Each year, I say I’m going to retire from the camp, but I just can’t.”

NECYSC celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. The camp provides about 300 children with safe activities and a taste of Chinese culture and history each summer. In addition to serving as the camp nurse administering medications and providing health assessments, Wong—whose husband is Chinese—teaches a couple classes during the camp such as a general health course and one on Chinese customs.

Members of the camp’s board of directors recruited Wong to help out at a clinic run from a Buddhist temple in Chinatown. Wong said, “We are getting ready to start our third year giving flu shots. Laura Manning, RN, 8D, Al Veras, RN, 8AB, Patricia Giltrap, RN, 8AB, and Andrew Ruddle, RN, float pool, have always volunteered to return and help,” she said.

“At BWH, there are a lot of us who like to volunteer and help the community,” Wong said.