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Send in the Books
Right around the time that President George
W. Bush was announcing plans to send additional troops into Iraq,
officials at the Duke School of Nursing were announcing plans of
their own—to send more books.
In early January, members of the School of Nursing community sent
thirty-eight cartons containing 901 used medical textbooks to Hawler
Medical University in Erbil, Iraq. The idea was conceived during
a conversation between Tobin Hill M.S.N. ’01 and Marva Price, an
assistant professor of nursing. Hill, who had just returned from
serving as a nurse practitioner with the National Guard in Iraq,
“mentioned that if we ever had excess books, that the people of
Iraq could surely use them,” Price says. “So we put the word out.”
Randall Williams, a local obstetrician who volunteers with Medical
Alliance for Iraq, a nonprofit organization working with International
Medical Corp. to advance health care in Iraq, used that existing
relationship to persuade International Medical Corp. to ship the
books to Jordan; from there, they will be carried in by volunteers.
Williams says that Iraqi health-care professionals, who once had
strong connections with British schools, have long been cut off
from the West. “One Iraqi told me that what they wanted most was
not another CT scanner, but the most recent obstetrical care guidelines,”
he says.
The textbooks cover subjects such as undergraduate nursing, primary
care, pediatrics, anaesthesia, surgical nursing, reproductive health,
oncology, and geriatrics. “A lot of the accelerated bachelor of
nursing students who finished classes in the past year have donated
their textbooks,” says Judith Hays, director of the ABSN program.
“In fact, most of the books are from 2000 or later.”
www.nursing.duke.edu |
