Pride of Australia: Red Cross nurse’s career one disaster after another

JUST 24 hours from now, Ruth Jebb could be on a plane, destined for a disaster zone.

Brisbane nurse Ruth Jebb has been nominated for a Pride of Australia award for her efforts as an international aid worker and an emergency nurse at Princess Alexandra Hospital. She is pictured in Nepal, where she was deployed in May to coordinate the community health response in the aftermath of two deadly earthquakes.

JUST 24 hours from now, Ruth Jebb could be on a plane, destined for a disaster zone.

The Brisbane emergency nurse always has a bag packed and her passport ready, knowing Red Cross could send her to a nation in distress at any moment.

“You don’t get time to think about where you’re going or what’s happened,” Ms Jebb said.

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That was the case in May when she was called on to coordinate the community health response in Nepal following a 7.8-magnitude earthquake.

Just after landing in Kathmandu, she was trapped in a taxi when another destructive tremor struck.

Brisbane nurse Ruth Jebb is nominated for a Care and Compassion Medal.

She managed to shake off the shock and launch into four weeks of working “sun-up to sundown” without a day off to complete one of her most rewarding deployments.

“The overall response was quite impressive,” she said.

In the past decade, she has completed 14 overseas missions.

On her first mission in northern Kenya in 2005, treating wounded soldiers and civilians who fled war-torn Sudan, she was once the only nurse on a night shift duty in a field hospital packed with 450 patients.

In 2007, she was carjacked at gunpoint while deployed in Sudan treating sick children caught up in the conflict.

Ms Jebb, who also works as a clinical nurse at Princess Alexandra Hospital and a midwife at Mater Mothers’ Hospital, has been nominated for a Pride of Australia Care and Compassion Medal.

Visit Pride of Australia to nominate by Sunday, July 19