Nurse of the Week: VA Nurse Ben Busey is Always Ready to Serve in a Crisis

Nurse of the Week Ben Busey is no stranger to crises. In addition to working as an Urgent Care Nurse Manager at the Roseburg VA Medical Center in Oregon, Busey is also a part of the VA’s Disaster Emergency Medical Personnel System (DEMPS), which deployed him in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria struck. So, he was ready to serve when COVID-19 started to spread in beleaguered New Orleans.

The 34-year-old Busey spent two weeks at the VA in New Orleans at the height of the pandemic, and says, “The first day I walked in there, two people died within the first two hours of me arriving. They had just run out of body bags, the ICU.” In addition to coping with the strained hospital resources, like most frontline nurses he did all he could to maintain connections between isolated patients and their loved ones: “I would end up calling them in the middle of the night to give them updates on a small improvement on my patient, just because I knew that they couldn’t see their family member and they weren’t allowed to be on the unit with them, and they were probably just worrying all the time about how their family member was doing.”

Warned of the PPE shortage in advance, he packed N95 masks for his trip, and used his small supply sparingly, often wearing the same mask for as many as five shifts in a row. Upon his arrival, he quickly learned that it is unwise to make assumptions merely because your age and health place you in a fairly low-risk group. As Busey recalls, “The person who oriented me for a couple of hours that first day when I arrived, he had just come back from being ill with COVID and he was 31. The way he described it, he said every day he sat in his room and he wondered am I dying, because he felt so sick and short of breath…” Fortunately, Busey himself returned unscathed; his test results after his return to Oregon proved negative.

Busey worked night shifts, and provided strong, capable support during his two weeks in New Orleans. When he came back to the Roseburg VA Medical Center, the Center presented him with official recognition for his work during the crisis.

For more on Dan Busey’s experience in New Orleans, visit here.

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Koren Thomas

Associate Editor at DailyNurse

Koren Thomas (pictured with Assistant) was the associate editor of DailyNurse from late 2019 through July, 2022—and she was not joking about the "issue postage stamps saluting US nurses" idea. Send your article ideas, submissions, Nurse of the Week suggestions, comments, and corrections to the current Editor in Chief at [email protected].