Nurse To Work In Vietnam

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31776, 5 September 1968, Page 3

Nurse To Work In Vietnam

After four years nursing in New Guinea as a volunteer with the Marist Society, Miss Bernadette O’Neill, of Christchurch, is on overseas service again. She left recently to work with the New Zealand surgical team at Qui Nhon, in South Vietnam.

Soon after returning to New Zealand last December, she decided she wanted to go back to work among the people of underdeveloped countries. “I support completely the Americans’ and our action in South Vietnam,” she said recently. As soon as I returned from Bougainville I started looking for a voluntary organisation I could join to go over there. But, at the time, there wasn’t one, so I applied to join the surgical team at Qui Nhon.” Born in Christchurch, Miss O’Neill was educated at Sacred Heart College and trained at Wellington tai. Now a registered nurse and midwife, she extended her experience during a five-year working holiday overseas in Britain and Europe. She spent a year of this in the Netherlands at the Rotterdam Hospital and another at Florence Nightingale Hospital, in London, where she once met and assisted a visiting surgeon who was also a New Zealander—Sir Arthur Porritt, now Governor-General. Her off-duty activities in- ; elude tennis and, while in Austria, ski-ing—a sport she does not expect to continue in South Vietnam. At Qui Nhon she will be one of the six New Zealand nurses with the surgical team, doing .specialised nursing and helping to train Vietnamese nurses in more advanced work. Maternity Work A recent meeting with the team’s interpreter, Mr Vu Van Su, in New Zealand for three months under the Colombo Plan to study nursing and hospital administration, has assured her that her

maternity nursing skills will also be in demand. “Maternal care is valuable, not only for its own sake, but also as a lead towards getting to know the people,” she explained. “In most of these countries, when you admit the mother you admit the whole family, and Mr Su told me the small maternity hospital at Qui Nhon is urgently in need of help.”