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Wairarapa’s nursing hero painted a mural to brighten the children’s ED cubicle in her home hospital before flying out to nurse for the Red Cross in South Sudan.

NAME: Jenny Percival
DHB: Wairarapa
JOB: Nurse educator, acute services and Red Cross nurse

Jenny Percival wears a number of hats. She is a nurse educator in acute services at Wairarapa Hospital, a humanitarian aid worker and a talented artist.

Currently she is wearing her Red Cross nurse hat and is nursing in the war-torn zone of South Sudan, which she left for soon after her local mission of brightening up the children’s cubicle in the emergency department with the pictured owl mural.
Jenny took up her nurse educator role at Wairarapa Hospital about a year ago, following 15 years as a staff nurse in the emergency department. She works with the nursing team in acute services to support, train and update staff on the latest developments and research in clinical practice and procedures. She assists new staff and graduates to develop skills and confidence and supports more experienced nurses to access opportunities to extend their knowledge. “It gives me great satisfaction to be able to support nurses to grow and develop,” says Jenny.

Jenny is also driven by a passion for humanitarian work. After training with the New Zealand Red Cross and their Red Cross partners in Switzerland, she worked on the front line in a treatment centre in Sierra Leone at the height of the Ebola epidemic. She says, “I feel the pull to make a difference where it’s needed most. If I can save one person from a life-threatening condition and that person survives, it creates a ripple effect.”

She is currently on a six-month mission with the New Zealand Red Cross (seconded to the International Committee of the Red Cross); part of a small surgical team at Juba military hospital, in South Sudan – the world’s newest country where civil war has been waging for more than 10 years. “There are three expat nurses and we look after two surgical wards and a small ICU with limited resources, including water.”

The biggest barrier though is communication. Jenny’s nurse educator skills are being put to good use as part of her job involves helping to train local nurses and nursing students who speak mainly Arabic, so teaching vital signs is a new challenge. There are plenty of other challenges too. “I have never seen so many limb amputations and it breaks my heart to see this, especially the young women and children with gunshot wounds,” Jenny writes from the war-torn zone.

No stranger to a challenge, Jenny will no doubt rise to meet it, much like the way she took on her own mission to brighten the children’s ward in acute services with a mural of colourful owls – just before she left for South Sudan. Jenny’s prime motivation was to make children and their families more comfortable in times of pain and stress. “Having something attractive with lots of points of interest provides a welcome distraction where parents can talk to their children about what the owls are doing,” she says. 
Caring and humble, Jenny says she is “just an ordinary person doing something that feels like the right thing to do”.