Commentary: Why we need to look after our nurses' health
By Cheedy Jaja / For The Conversation
Since the beginning of the profession, nurses have played pivotal roles during outbreaks of disease, delivering care throughout even the bleakest of public health emergencies.
Here’s my story: In 2014, the world was slowly recognizing that the Ebola outbreak in West Africa was monumental in scale and getting worse. More than 30,000 were infected, and 11,000 would die. Transmitted from person to person, the disease was mostly in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia. As local health care systems struggled to respond to the large cases of infected patients, nurses from around the world came to help; I was among them. I am an associate professor of nursing at the University of South Carolina College of Nursing and a board certified psychiatry and mental health advanced nurse practitioner.
When our team arrived in Sierra Leone in December, 2014, there were 450 cases being recorded weekly. The health care infrastructure had been devastated by a decade of civil war, and it lacked trained health care workers, medical supplies and hospital beds for the surging Ebola cases.
I was drawn to serve in Sierra Leone at the height of the epidemic because of the duty to care that we nurses believe is part of our profession. I felt a calling even though I had no idea what I could offer. But I would do whatever was asked of me.
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