I Am a Transport Pediatric Nurse | Cincinnati Children’s

www.cincinnatichildrens.org
My name is Neka Williams, and I'm a registered nurse on the Cincinnati Children's Critical Care Transport Team. I am definitely a helper. I have always been a helper. I've always been someone who has wanted to help, to fix, to do things like that, to serve others. So, nursing has always just been something that has drawn to me. I believe that it's truly something that you do with your heart and that you have to have a heart to be a servant to others.
I spent eleven years in another NICU and would see the Cincinnati Children's Transport Team come in and transport the babies that I was taking care of, and every time they came in, I just knew that that was something I really wanted to be a part of. The Critical Care Transport Team is responsible for transporting children here to Cincinnati Children's. There's about 75 people on the Transport Team, that is comprised of respiratory therapists, registered nurses and paramedics. We travel by squad. We travel by private medical jet and helicopter. And then, after you are hired on the team, there is extensive training that goes into safety. The biggest thing for our team is making sure that we are safe, ourselves, but also that we're able to safely transport children back here. There is the possibility that an emergency landing could occur and sometimes we are traveling to, say, West Virginia, where we're in the mountains, and we have to be able to survive on what we have on our person. So, we all go through survival training, not just to learn how to build fires and how to find water and to make sure we know where we are spatially, but also to work as a team, because we have to be able to function as a team in order to survive. My ability to go home at the end of the day and to arrive safely at every destination is because of my co-workers. This is a Nomex flight suit. It is flame retardant. We also have speciality jackets, boots and things that we wear that would help us survive fires or help us survive the cold, if we were to be stranded. It's truly a job like no other. The teamwork and the camaraderie that is within our team, you'll never find that anywhere else. I mean, we truly rely on each other every single day for everything.
Working at Cincinnati Children's has definitely broadened my knowledge base, broadened me as a nurse. It has definitely made a giant impact on the type of nurse that I am. The amount of knowledge that I've received from working with such a diverse population is just phenomenal. I couldn't imagine working anywhere else.
My name is Neka, and I am a nurse.