Labor & Employment Law

More NNU Nurses Answer Call to Help Haitian Quake Survivors

By Mike Hall

Another contingent of National Nurses United (NNU) nurse volunteers is on its way to Haiti to help provide much needed medical care to the earthquake survivors. The 10 RNs are part of NNU’s RN Response Network (RNRN).

This group includes intensive care, medical/surgical and pediatric nurses from California, Massachusetts and Texas. NNU Co-President Deborah Burger is part of the volunteer group.

They will be working side by side with Haitian nurses and doctors at Sacre Coeur Hospital, in northern Haiti, which provides medical care for the region’s 225,000 residents. They leave on the nine-day deployment April 9 and the RNRN is working with hospital officials to organize continuing volunteer nurse rotations. NNU reports that thousands of nurses have volunteered to serve in Haiti.

Ashley Forsberg, RN, from Lansing, Mich., was one of the first RNRN volunteers after the January earthquake and served on the hospital ship USNS Comfort. After she returned home in February, Forsberg wrote on the group’s website:

We have to realize that just because the media has moved on and the emergency patients are taken care of doesn’t mean we’re finished in Haiti. The people there are facing a public health crisis that we can’t even imagine here in the United States.

Click here to read more from Forsberg and other volunteers.

Following the devastating Jan. 12 earthquake, trade unions around the world mobilized support on an unprecedented scale. The AFL-CIO Solidarity Center acted quickly to send needed supplies and support to its Haitian partners through a union-to-union effort that provides short-term emergency aid and builds toward long-term reconstruction and strengthening of Haiti’s union movement.

You can help by making a donation to the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center’s Earthquake Relief for Haitian Workers‘ campaign. Union Plus will match your donation dollar for dollar, up to $100,000.

To learn about other union relief efforts since the quake, click here, here, here,  here and here.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on April 05, 2010 (boomark / email).