In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, people all over the country are coming together to help those who help us – nurses and health-care workers on the front lines.
Jean Ann Wear of Durham, North Carolina, donated 45 headbands with buttons to support nurses in the operating room at Duke Regional Hospital. The headbands allow nurses to put mask straps around the buttons instead of their ears, which makes it more comfortable to wear their face masks.
Wear thought of this gift idea after her friend, Janet, a nurse supervisor at the Advocate Sherman Hospital in Elgin, Illinois, reached out to her and requested headbands with buttons for her staff. She bought several batches of headbands and recruited her church friends, neighbors, and coworkers to help sew the buttons. Together they sewed 120 headbands. Wear donated 30 headbands to the Advocate Sherman Hospital, 45 to Duke Regional Hospital, and 45 to Wake Med Hospital, and she continues to sew more.
“I’m not a medical professional, but I try to make things a little better and easier for the medical teams on the front lines,” Wear says.
“The operating room team is very grateful for the beautiful headbands,” says Rene' Livingston Flowers, MHA, BSN, RN, CNOR, nurse manager of operations for the Department of Surgical Services at Duke Regional Hospital. “It brought on smiles, under the mask, of course, and lifted the spirits of the team knowing we were thought of during these unprecedented times.”
LulaRoe Leggings for Nurses
Melissa Riccardi and Sara Torlish, who market LulaRoe clothing through their Facebook page, LulaRoe Melissa and Sara, donated 200 pairs of leggings to nurses at Duke University Hospital.
The leggings were distributed to many of the hospital’s outpatient clinics, and the teams used them as raffle prizes during National Nurses Week, May 6-12.
“It was one of the highlights of the week, and it brought together the teams for some fun and excitement,” says Lindsy Anthony, MSN’18, RN, NE-BC, clinical operations director at Duke Neurosciences 1L and Morreene Road Clinics. “We even had some nurses who never wore leggings before and asked, ‘How do these gadgets work? Is it one size fits all?’ In times like this, these are the memories that glue us together a team.”
By Aliza Inbari