What does community mean to you?

Kathleen | Tūranganui-a-Kiwa

Over seven years as a community nurse, Kathleen has witnessed collective care, love, and support during both the highs and lows of everyday life.

I am a community nurse. I work as a rural nurse out in the western rural area and I’ve been doing that for seven years and I absolutely love my job. It’s not just the nature of the job, it’s also the people that I look after.

I drive quite far to see people in the community and I go to them and do nursing tasks and roles and it’s beautiful because when you go there you’re very task oriented, you need to do a dressing, you need to check their blood pressure, check their medications, but you also look at them in a holistic manner.

You have to look at if they have good support at home. Is their family involved in their care? Is their house a nice warm environment? Do the kids have enough support? Their mental, their spiritual aspects as well, the social aspects.

And in the last seven years of me working in the community, I’ve seen – well Gisborne has seen – a lot of tragedies, and I could really feel our sense of community coming out during Covid, during Cyclone Gabrielle. You can see the love. You can see the way they are concerned for each other.

In my role, I do a lot of palliative care as well and everybody comes together. You don’t have to tell them what to do. So when a person is dying and even though they’re not related to each other, people will see the nurse has come, and they all come.

They bring their food, they bring their love, they bring their time and their effort, and it’s such a beautiful thing for me to see. And also to be able to allow people to support that person in the community.

It’s such a very inspiring thing for me to be able to witness.