Just days after receiving the world’s highest nursing honour, the Florence Nightingale medal, Kiwi nurse Andrew Cameron flew off to start his next Red Cross mission.
First stop Geneva to be briefed, then on to Kandahar – his third mission in Afghanistan since he started aid work for the humanitarian agency in 2005.
The prestigious Florence Nightingale medal is awarded by the International Committee of the Red Cross for nurses who distinguish themselves in times of peace or war by showing “exceptional courage and devotion to the wounded, sick or disabled or to civilian victims of conflict or disaster”.
Sir Jerry Mateparae, the Governor-General, presented Cameron with his medal at a Government House ceremony recently when he was back in New Zealand between missions.
Cameron found out about his award in June while serving in South Ossetia (near Georgia). The former war zone was one of his more “relaxed” postings in a Red Cross career that’s included nursing the war wounded on the Sudan border, managing a hospital project near the Khyber Pass, serving in Red Cross camps in mountainous north Yemen, and offering emergency training in a city on Iraq’s Euphrates river.
Cameron said he accepted the medal in recognition of all the Kiwi nurses currently working in “desperate situations, harsh environments and places far from ideal”.
Also attending the medal ceremony was former Hutt Valley Hospital director of nursing Vera Ellen, who took on the teenage welder as a nursing student back in 1976 – the only male in a class of 43.
Cameron nursed in Wellington Hospital intensive care after graduation, before crossing the ditch to Australia where he nursed on a remote tropical island off the north Queensland coast and in a Western Australian goldmining “ghost town”.
When he was a sole charge nurse in Cue, Western Australia, in 2004, he won Australian Nurse of the Year for his contribution to remote area nursing.
Cameron is the 25th New Zealand nurse to be honoured with the Florence Nightingale medal – the first was awarded in 1920. The Red Cross awards just 50 medals worldwide every two years.
