Excellent article- "Medical Missions - Nursing for a Cause"

Last month Sue was featured on the web based site "Health Callings, Jobs that Matter". Linda Childers wrote up a quick little article about Sue's first start into the medical mission world and why she and Stacie started One Nurse At A Time. 

Some of the best lines out of the interview are from Sue's version of how volunteering adds to your resume...read on:

“Serving on a medical mission will make you a more well-rounded nurse,” Averill says. “You care for many patients who have never received formal medical care and may have walked for days to receive treatment. They are all so grateful for the services provided to them."

“Serving on a medical mission offers nurses a life-changing and career-changing experience,” Averill says. “You’re working in an environment where you have to problem solve and think quickly on your feet.”

Today Sue is off in Guatemala with our first Jo's Nurses Mission. These nurses are taking full advantage of Sue's medical knowledge as a 20+ year nurse and as an experienced volunteer nurse. When they return, we hope to share their experiences with you. 

Best lines from the article by far:

Once nurses serve on a medical mission, Averill says they are typically hooked.

“I think we often forget how much teaching we do in our daily nursing jobs and how much we truly have to share with others,” she says. “On a medical mission, you are able to share your talents and skills with patients in need as well as with colleagues from all over the world. You not only change the lives of many patients and their families; you will be changed as well.”

If you would like to read the full article- please click HERE

As always, thanks!

ONAAT

Happy New Year Wishes from One Nurse At A Time

Can you believe that the year is already coming to an end? I find it amazing as I get older how much faster time seems to fly. It's almost as if my life is on a constant fast forward!

One Nurse At A Time has had a wonderful year, but we also had several sad parts along the way- we lost two of our very active and incredibly valuable volunteer nurses - Staci Kelley and Nancy Leigh Harless. Both nurses gave their heart and soul to the organization and were incredibly gifted in their talents!

With losing two volunteers we also gained help as well!  Our team has grown in leaps and bounds this year. We are very happy to have David Fox, Helen Jose and Christine Van Horn be part of our team. The three of them have provided tremendous energy and work towards our goals and mission.

As usual Sue has been working non-stop! She has met with several people this year, connecting and marketing our organization, even to top organizations like the Red Cross!  With Sue's never-ending energy, she gives us all life and energy to continue our work for the mission and goals of One Nurse At A Time.

Jo's Mission will be a the big kick-off for the beginning of 2013. We are excited and ready to start the process of assisting new nurse volunteers merge into the volunteering community. We will be reporting on the mission and updating our blog with it's progress.

Lastly, if you have not had the opportunity to see our latest short film we would love for you to take about 3 minutes and watch - we are very honored to be working for this organization and we hope that we can continue to provide assistance, education and help to those who have the passion and drive to volunteer throughout our world.

Here is our video:

Thank you for a wonderful year, looking forward to what 2013 brings us!


Cheers-

ONAAT Crew

Mission Impossible?

Since you read our blog, or are a fan of our Facebook page, twitter, or pinterest, you either have been on a mission or are interested in going on one. Well this post will specifically address those who haven’t been on a mission…yet. J

This is the picture I want to have in my head when I think about going on my first mission.  J

So, how do you start the process? I wrote a while back about the process of becoming a Red Cross Volunteer and hopefully gave good instructions on how that works, but what if you want to volunteer with an organization that isn’t as big as the Red Cross?

Several of the organizations we highlight weekly are not the bigger humanitarian organizations such as Doctors without Borders and the Red Cross. It’s difficult to find an organization if you do not know what you are looking for. Luckily we have made it a little bit easier for you.

With those thoughts in mind, I started to think about what my plans are going to be for this next year. Do I want to go and participate in helping internationally like all of the scholarship applicants I read about? I have a lot to think about- I have two young kids under the age of 3. I wonder how will my husband handle it? Will I be ok traveling by myself without my family and without seeing my husband and kids every night?

So, using what we created on our web page (here) I started to look at “Global Health Nursing”. I’m not totally sure what it means, but I think I have a faint idea and I know FOR sure I can’t handle pediatrics at this point in my life…and with that in mind, pediatrics excludes, disaster response, peds, and possibly women’s health. After deciding what kind of nursing I was interested in the next question on the list wanted to know how far I was willing to go. I selected international. Why? Because I thought, well I do volunteer locally, and I really want to experience health care in Central America or South America (I think Africa is too far for me at this point in my life).

The question “are you interested in an experience that is faith based” is next on the list of questions. For me it doesn’t matter and I would like to have every opportunity present itself first and then choose. The final question is in regards to the length of the trip, I choose short less than 4 weeks and optimally less than 2 weeks would be awesome – (because I think I would truly miss my family WAY too much to go longer).

Up popped about 10-15 different organizations for me to choose from. Excellent! But then I was suddenly overwhelmed. Yikes. What do I do with this information? How do I know which organization is a good fit, or that has had good first mission experiences, would I have help when I was there, what if I didn’t know what to do? The list of questions started to form in my head, and it kept going. I had to start somewhere, so I started to scan each organization by their name. What was interesting was that I recognized a lot of organizations from the scholarship applicants I read with One Nurse At A Time. For me that was refreshing, but I can imagine, for someone who doesn’t have that opportunity, it would be overwhelming to get this giant list and not know what really to do with it.

Since some sounded familiar I picked the first one that my eyes found, Christian Medical Mission Aww…more familiar faces… J What a relief. I click on the details button read the short bio on ONAAT. I recognized that the short bio’s were SOOOO helpful. When I checked out others, I could recognize right away, that I wouldn't be a fit because I could not determine from their organizations name if they were peds specialized or they were stationed in areas that were farther away than Central America.  

After determining I wanted to check out Christian Medical Missions, I simply clicked on the link provided. EASY!  Their website is super easy to navigate! Searching through their next trips, I found one which may work for me, it’s in May of next year. I clicked on the trip details and up pops the needs of mission. Here are the details: Villages surrounding Lake Atitlan, Guatemala, May 11-19^th, 2013. What I can’t tell is if they have filled all of their positions for RN’s. It appears that they have one RN that has filled the pharmacy/RN position – so I will email them specifically to ask if the RN positions are filled. For more info about this trip click here.

Wow – before I started I thought it would have been more difficult- but as it turns out WE have a great website that will help you FIND the organizations you want to work with. Yeah!

As a side note, even though we have cancelled Jo’s Mission for this fall, we are definitely looking at opportunities to start it up again this spring. PLEASE STAY tuned!

Cheers-

ONAAT Crew

News from ONAAT

Couple of things have happened over the last week. One great, and one kind of a bummer.

Let's get the bad news out of the way first...our Jo's Mission is cancelled for this November. It is cancelled because we did not have enough nurses to make sense for us to pursue this mission. If I remember correctly, I think we had 2 nurses sign up and we would have considered it IF we had a total of 4 or 5 nurses sign up...
However, this isn't all together bad news. We are not going to just write it off the list and forget about it...Sue is going to contact her network and see if this spring we can try and get another mission going for our first time nurses. I am hopeful.
One of the bigger stumbling blocks, we discovered with the requirements for an applicant was the Spanish speaking requirement. A lot of my ED nurses said "Hey! I was going to sign up for that, but I DEFINITELY do not speak Spanish." So with that thought in mind, I think we will look at the spring for a trip and possibly without the requirement that you must speak Spanish. Please stay tuned!
Ok- one to the great news. Sue with her endless abilities to work 24/7 has signed up ONE NURSE AT A TIME with CharityChoice Gift Card. Yeah! An answer to our never-ending questions to raising money for our organization.
The CharityChoice Gift Card is a program that enables ONAAT to be offered as an option for gift-recipients to select when redeeming their CharityChoice Gift Card. Our hope is that the more people we tell about our little organization the more we have to give to our nurses helping communities across the world!

Here is a link to the Charity Choice Gift Card: CharityChoice Gift Card

August’s ONAAT Boarding Meeting

Another great board meeting this evening and it couldn't have been a nicer night!  The sunset was beautiful as it slowly dropped over the Olympic Mountains spilling its last sun-rays out across the sky, what a beautiful state we live in.

Since Staci has departed, it has taken me a while to get the hang of getting blog posts up on a regular basis, especially with two kids under the age of 3 and a part-time job – which seems to be more than part-time at times. So, my hope is to be a bit more regular and to give everyone an idea of what we are up too. J

Tonight we had an informal board meeting, mostly to have a face to face to meet our two newest additions to our One Nurse At A Time team. Our first addition is a fellow board member, Helen Jose. Helen Jose is a registered nurse serving her community in the southern part of Washington State. Helen comes to One Nurse At A Time with a lot of experience behind her. She has been in the nursing field since the 70’s and has tackled all sorts of nursing positions and departments. Right away, I think we all could tell that Helen will bring a lot of great experience and knowledge to the One Nurse At A Time table.

Our second addition to the ONAAT crew is Christine Van Horn. Christine is currently working for One Nurse At A Time in a paid position, our first! She is working on updating our directory, ensuring the organizations have all of the correct information posted on our site and assist ONAAT with coordination with our scholarship recipients.   Christine is currently employed at a local emergency department. She is definitely the go-to gal as she seems to have her hands in a little bit of everything – from data abstraction for Trauma and Stroke patients, filling in as the ED’s unit secretary when staff are sick, to capturing meeting minutes, creating dashboards, coordinating nurse managers and medical directors, and all while having a cheerful smile on her face.

We had a lot to discuss over dinner and drinks tonight. Most of our conversation surrounded our up and coming Jo’s Mission, marketing, goals, and discussion about our 5 year plan for One Nurse At A Time. It was good to get out, share our vision with one another and plan for future events and meetings. Here is just a little glimpse of what we were blessed with during our dinner tonight. Enjoy!