2008: Kathy Morgan

CPHA Health Digest, Vol. 32, No. 1, Spring 2008

Kathy Morgan says she never dreamed that her nursing career would take her on a mission in Bangladesh as a volunteer to assist with the global eradication of polio. For three months in 2007, she was assigned to the district of Cox’s Bazaar in the Chittagong division to assist with a mass immunization campaign, followed by house-to-house searches looking for children who had not been vaccinated. The aim of the campaign was to interrupt the circulation of wild poliovirus by immunizing every child less than five years of age. “The work was challenging,” she says, “as it brought me to very remote areas. I went from house to house looking for chalk marks on doors to ensure that children at every house had been immunized.” She was also involved in the immunization of refugee children. “There were some 20,000 refugees from Myanmar living in makeshift camps,” she says. Finger markings had to be used instead of chalk marks since the children moved from camp to camp. Ms. Morgan has undertaken several short-term contracts as a community health nurse in Nunavut and the Yukon and currently is a homeless outreach nurse at the Centretown Community Health Centre in Ottawa.