At Vernon Christian Middle School we had a week dedicated to ‘Break the Cycle’. This means that throughout the week, student groups went out into the community to ‘break the cycle’ or find brokenness within the Vernon community. The group I was in was the health services. We had eleven girls in this group, from grades 7 to 9. We wanted to help support and bless the healthcare system. At first, we wanted to volunteer at the hospital, but we quickly learned that we were not able to do that because it was not practical to volunteer for only two days. So we then wanted to do something for the nurses. We felt that the majority of nurses don’t receive enough credit for what they do. Some brokenness is that we don’t give them nearly enough credit for what they do. Ideally, we wanted to help support the nurses in Vernon. This relates to me because I would like to pursue nursing at a post-secondary level.
As a group, we decided to make care packages for nurse stations within the Vernon Jubilee Hospital, as well as the Vernon Health Unit (Interior Health), and Noric House. On Thursday, May 24th, 2018 we made our care packages and a group of us headed to the Hospital, and the other half of our group went the Health Unit and Noric House. I was in the group that went to the hospital. We first stopped in an emergency, then to psych, physio, ortho, then lastly maternity. The nurses were very surprised and grateful. I’m glad that we were able to have this opportunity as well as to learn from some of the nurses.
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Our goal exceeded our expectations. The baskets turned out way better than we hoped. The gift baskets were received very well. The only real struggle we had was trying to connect with the nurses because they were always so busy. Luckily, a couple of the nurses were able to give us a nice talk about their department and what they do. Some nurses even talked about the brokenness or lacking in what they have at the hospital. A nurse in the maternity ward said that they really needed a birthing tub. This costs a lot of money, but our Health Services group wanted to help by starting a fundraiser. We hope to help the maternity ward in this way.
