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“Once there, I’ll be the ground correspondent to help Kaiser get organized,” says Samarakkody, who came to California from Asia to attend nursing school at Contra Costa College, later joining Kaiser where she’s worked for four years.

Samarakkody says she’ll also work with other organizations in Sri Lanka during her three-week stay, which might be extended. She says a big need is for trauma counseling, a field in which she’s trained. One group she’s hooking up with is the California Nurses Association, which helps support a hospital in Colombo that’s overwhelmed with patients.

The CNA donated several thousand dollars from its emergency fund to the public nurses union in Sri Lanka to equip vans with medical equipment for transporting aid to isolated regions. About 200 CNA nurses also volunteered to travel to the Southeast Asian coast, where hospitals are usually overflowing because of a severe shortage of nurses.

Meanwhile, Kaiser Permanente Northern California is working with the relief agency Doctors Without Borders to send medical teams and supplies to the hardest-hit regions. More than 200 physicians, nurses, and other Kaiser medical personnel have volunteered, Kaiser spokeswoman Alix Sabin says.

Kaiser also has donated $1 million to relief efforts, the largest portion of $500,000 going to Doctors Without Borders for its public health and medical care services. Another $250,000 went to the American Red Cross, which provides emergency aid, and $250,000 went to Operation USA, which handles shipments of supplies.

Help is on the way

Fueled by an unprecedented outpouring of private donations reaching hundreds of thousands of dollars, dozens of relief and humanitarian organizations geared up to send medical aid, personnel, and supplies to revive regions flattened by the powerful sea surge the day after Christmas.

While nurses across the country scrambled to volunteer their services in the tsunami’s aftermath, finding a sponsor isn’t easy. One of the largest agencies, the Red Cross, relies on its international network of chapters to supply emergency response teams in their areas.

The organization does maintain a call-up roster that includes nurses willing to go through a training course to assist in local disasters, says Mila Fairfax, spokeswoman for the American Red Cross Bay Area in San Francisco. Only 11 Red Cross volunteers were dispatched to the tsunami area from the United States, she says, including Jim Stephenson of Mill Valley, Calif., a supply logistics expert.

Doctors Without Borders is accepting only volunteers with training and experience in disaster relief, although the “Flying Docs” will sometimes take a nurse specialist on a maiden mission.

Nurses who feel a calling for relief work often can often sign on with a variety of relief organizations as well.

In Encinitas, Calif., Surf Aid International assembled a team of physicians, nurses, and health care professionals from California, New Zealand, and Australia, and sent it Jan. 8 to the small Indonesian island of Nias, a popular surfing destination that was swamped by the tsunami, killing hundreds. The team’s task is to assess damage, provide medical treatment, and teach islanders about hygiene, and ways to treat and prevent diseases such as typhoid, cholera, and malaria.

That same day, Santa Monica-based International Medical Corps dispatched a team of 25 trauma-specialist physicians and nurses to Banda Aceh, Indonesia, which was the closest town to the magnitude-9.0 undersea earthquake that triggered the tsunami and has become “ground zero” at the northern tip of Sumatra.

With much of the region’s health care system wiped out, including most of its medical personnel, wiped out, many tsunami victims need amputations because of festering wounds that have gone untreated and turned gangrenous, says Stephen Tomlin, IMC vice president of program policy and planning.

IMC has a core group of native health care workers in the region, Tomlin says, but the destruction overwhelmed them and they asked for help with the “walking wounded,” some of whom were trapped for days under debris. A field report from a region east of Banda Aceh reported that only 89 people were left alive in one village of 1,000, he says.

The team — from a roster of volunteers who agree to go to disaster areas with a 72-hour notice — includes four California nurses:

• David Gantz, RN, Lafayette, an ED nurse from Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Berkeley.
• Jeanie Schmidt, RN, San Jose, a staff nurse from Kaiser Permanente in Oakland.
• Ashley Garcia, RN, San Pedro, a trauma and ED nurse from Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.
• Andrea Gillespie, RN, a nurse anesthesiologist from Family Planning Associates Medical Group in Long Beach.