Continued from Page 1

Sponsored by Northwest Medical Teams International and the Washington Kurdish Institute, Maldonado and two fellow specialists in critical care and pediatrics each trained about 10 students six days a week. Although their students had formalized training, Iraqi nursing skills were on par with a nurses aide, she said. None had training in anatomy, physiology, and assessment basics.

The nurses supplemented crash courses on the sometimes mind-numbing scientific basics of nursing with lessons in rudimentary nursing skills, like CPR, blood pressure reading, and knowing the importance of hygiene.

Home front

Nurses like Delmar Imperial-Aubin, RN, are doing what they can from home to feed this appetite for information. Inspired by an article on public health in Iraq that included an address for donations, Imperial-Aubin set about gathering what she could.

She took castoffs left by her school of nursing at the University of Texas, which had cleaned house before moving to a new building. She asked faculty for donations. She went to her 150 colleagues in the cardiovascular intensive care unit at Methodist DeBakey Heart Center in Houston, and together they gathered more books, journal articles, slides of human anatomy, and medical supplies.

“I’m just trying to get nurses to do something they could do as a group,” she said.

The chief nurse executive of the hospital is helping to collect items, too.

Imperial-Aubin has spread the word grassroots-style, buttonholing nurses from around the country at the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses conference in Orlando, Fla.

“It’s going to be a little bit at a time, and it’s going to be grassroots,” said Imperial-Aubin, who will pay out of her own pocket the cost of sending the 100 pounds of materials she has already packed into boxes.

While texts and supplies flow east, other efforts are under way to bring Iraqi nurses to the West. Thanks to donations from private philanthropists, the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing hosted two Iraqi nurses for one week as part of a broader effort to share cultural understanding, said Afaf Meleis, PhD, FAAN, the Margaret Bond Simon dean of the nursing school.

“It is an opportunity to compare notes,” Meleis said.

Accompanied by McHale — who had taken them to civilian hospitals the week before — the nurses toured University of Pennsylvania’s critical care and pediatric units to see how an American academic hospital is structured. They shadowed a nurse in critical care recovery rooms, visited the birthing center, and surveyed prenatal and postpartum care, she said.

The pair also had an opportunity to talk with faculty members about the structure of the nursing school’s curriculum and what clinical experiences the school provides its students. Talk of classes and courses of study was put in the context of societal needs, religion, and community values, Meleis said.

“We hope we’ll dispel some of the myths they might have about us and that we have about them,” she said.

To comment on this story, send e-mail to editorsc@nurseweek.com.