Nursing professor wins award for international service

By Marcia Porter | July 2, 2015

Looking over her resumé from more than a decade of international development work, Dr. Donna Moralejo, associate dean (graduate programs), School of Nursing, says it was likely her interest in travel to remote destinations that led to her first volunteer project.

In 2002 she travelled to Haiti for three-and-a-half months with the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Stop Transmission of Polio Project. Through networking and collaborations with other key partners, one project led naturally to another.

Thirteen years later, Dr. Moralejo received, in front of a large and admiring group of her peers, the 2015 Moira Walker Memorial Award for International Service from Infection Prevention and Control (IPAC) Canada.

“It’s an honour to receive it, especially as I had met Moira Walker at a number of conferences over the years,” she said.

A nurse and past president of IPAC Canada, Moira Walker played a key role in international infection prevention through her involvement with the International Federation of Infection Control.

Dr. Moralejo was nominated by her colleagues from the Newfoundland and Labrador chapter of IPAC and was named by IPAC Canada as this year’s award recipient for her many community-based projects in countries such as Haiti, Ethiopia, Indonesia and Burkina Faso.

“It’s so interesting to see how other people live, work, and cope,” said Dr. Moralejo, who draws on her skills in nursing, epidemiology, and microbiology to help strengthen disease surveillance systems and improve immunization by helping build capacity in health-care workers and programs. “It gives you such a different perspective on resilience. Many people don’t have basic necessities like soap and water and yet they are cheerful and work very hard at being able to move things forward.”

Dr. Moralejo wishes that more people from developed counties could see how others live.

“I think we would become more compassionate and understanding.”

Her most memorable project was in Ethiopia in 2008-09, Dr. Moralejo says. She worked with health sciences students in nursing, medicine and pharmacy to help develop their knowledge and skills related to immunization programs, part of which included training of community-based health extension workers.

“You could really see the building of the health extension worker roles, and development of interpersonal skills among the students, who also ran clinics and immunized a lot of children,” she said. “It’s just amazing how a few people can help others to do good things.”

 


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