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Pat Guenther, right, is the president and founder of Nurses With a Purpose, an organization to help underserved populations with medical care by volunteer nurses.
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ENLARGE
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A child sits on a bed, recovering from polio in an orphanage in Ethiopia. Two hundred dollars a month pays for food, shelter and medical care until he recovers and can return to his village.
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GLENWOOD SPRINGS - Pat Guenther has big plans for nurses.
The Glenwood Springs resident is starting a nonprofit company, Nurses with a Purpose. She plans to send nurses around the world to help areas with inadequate medical care and rejuvenate the nursing community.
Nurses With a Purpose will provide an "opportunity to be locally involved in something that's affecting people on the other side of the planet," Guenther said.
The Glenwood Springs resident is starting a nonprofit company, Nurses with a Purpose. She plans to send nurses around the world to help areas with inadequate medical care and rejuvenate the nursing community.
Nurses With a Purpose will provide an "opportunity to be locally involved in something that's affecting people on the other side of the planet," Guenther said.
Guenther returned from a trip to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on Christmas day. She'd been scouting potential sites to send nurses. She met a boy infected with HIV. For the cost of 10 cents, medication could have been given to his mother during birth, she said. It would have reduced his risk of contracting the disease by 90 percent - if only someone had been there to administer it. She saw long lines of people waiting outside clinics for days to see a doctor.
Guenther said an ABC crew accompanied her to film a documentary about dysentery, but was turned away at the country's border. She said Ethiopian government officials didn't want to have poor health conditions in the country publicized.
Nurses with a Purpose also plans to send nurses to parts of the U.S. like New Orleans, which was left without adequate staff after Hurricane Katrina.
In the program, nurses would travel and work for one to four weeks. Nurses with a Purpose plans to send about 30 nurses to different sites in 2007 on a budget of approximately $500,000, but still needs additional funding, Guenther said. This would have the double benefit of providing additional health care where it is most needed and giving the nursing community a booster shot, Guenther said.
Guenther said an ABC crew accompanied her to film a documentary about dysentery, but was turned away at the country's border. She said Ethiopian government officials didn't want to have poor health conditions in the country publicized.
Nurses with a Purpose also plans to send nurses to parts of the U.S. like New Orleans, which was left without adequate staff after Hurricane Katrina.
In the program, nurses would travel and work for one to four weeks. Nurses with a Purpose plans to send about 30 nurses to different sites in 2007 on a budget of approximately $500,000, but still needs additional funding, Guenther said. This would have the double benefit of providing additional health care where it is most needed and giving the nursing community a booster shot, Guenther said.
A trip to another location would reconnect nurses with the reason they got into nursing, Guenther said.
Nurses enjoy actually putting their hands on people and the process of healing - they rarely have time to do things like hold a dying patient's hand anymore, she said.
It allows nurses to do what they really love instead of getting bogged down in the red tape that accompanies the hospital business, she said.
"It's just being there for somebody who's sick," she said. "You can really impact the experience for them. You can help them heal. I'm hoping more people in our society tap into that feeling."
Several years ago, Guenther returned to Glenwood Springs from Australia after a divorce and attended the first nursing program at Colorado Mountain College.
"I came back to Colorado with seven suitcases and two children," she said.
She was on welfare and other public aid so she could take care of her kids and to go to school. When she could no longer afford the schedule any more with her family - being on call, working holidays, long and late hours - she started trading shifts by e-mail among nurses at most of the hospitals on the Western Slope, she said.
The project evolved and she turned her service into a company in 2000. In 2003, she realized it would be more effective to actually add nurses to the nursing pool. She said she traveled to India to recruit nurses to the U.S. to fight the "nursing crisis" of a dwindling national nursing staff. That company, Stat Nurses International, sponsored legal immigration for about 70 nurses and has around 200 more in the pipeline.
"I saw the nursing numbers dwindling, and I wanted to do something to promote nursing as a profession," Guenther said.
Nurses enjoy actually putting their hands on people and the process of healing - they rarely have time to do things like hold a dying patient's hand anymore, she said.
It allows nurses to do what they really love instead of getting bogged down in the red tape that accompanies the hospital business, she said.
"It's just being there for somebody who's sick," she said. "You can really impact the experience for them. You can help them heal. I'm hoping more people in our society tap into that feeling."
Several years ago, Guenther returned to Glenwood Springs from Australia after a divorce and attended the first nursing program at Colorado Mountain College.
"I came back to Colorado with seven suitcases and two children," she said.
She was on welfare and other public aid so she could take care of her kids and to go to school. When she could no longer afford the schedule any more with her family - being on call, working holidays, long and late hours - she started trading shifts by e-mail among nurses at most of the hospitals on the Western Slope, she said.
The project evolved and she turned her service into a company in 2000. In 2003, she realized it would be more effective to actually add nurses to the nursing pool. She said she traveled to India to recruit nurses to the U.S. to fight the "nursing crisis" of a dwindling national nursing staff. That company, Stat Nurses International, sponsored legal immigration for about 70 nurses and has around 200 more in the pipeline.
"I saw the nursing numbers dwindling, and I wanted to do something to promote nursing as a profession," Guenther said.
