This August, the Johnson & Johnson (J&J) Campaign for Nursing’s Future was thrilled to host 12 Japanese and two U.S. nursing students as part of the Tomodachi J&J Disaster Nurse Training Program, a three-year initiative to help support leadership development and disaster medicine training for nurses through a partnership between the U.S. Japan Council, Children’s National Health System, J&J Japan and J&J Corporate.
The first leg of the two-week U.S. study tour was concentrated in the New York City metropolitan region, where students toured the 9/11 Memorial and the United Nations, and took a trip to the Jersey shore to learn about relief efforts from Hurricane Sandy. The students also spent a busy day at J&J World Headquarters in New Brunswick, N.J. After an Emergency Room (ER) trauma simulation at Rutgers University School of Nursing, the group came back to the J&J campus for a lunch-and-learn session with presentations from nurses from Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson, nursing students from the National Student Nurses’ Association and J&J executives about the Campaign for Nursing’s Future, J&J’s rich history in wound care, and its global and national efforts in emergency situations and more. The trip ended with an exciting week in Washington, D.C. with visits to Fairfax County Search and Rescue, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the American Red Cross headquarters and Wide Area Virtual Environment (WAVE), a large-scale simulator that the US government uses to train medical teams in battlefield and natural disaster scenarios.
In addition to providing hands-on, educational experiences with many people impacted by disasters, the program also helps foster long-term relationships between the Japanese students and their counterparts here in the U.S. so they can continue to exchange ideas throughout their careers. We hope that the knowledge and learnings from this trip will have a life-long impact on all of these students in their day-to-day professional lives as they continue to make a difference for patients around the world.
