Released on September 26, 2024
Alumna Hillary Mendel had plans to change the world when she arrived at East Carolina University in 2006. A Pirate Nurse, she realized her vision to use her nursing education to make a real difference in the lives of nurses and their patients on the other side of the world.
After graduating from ECU in 2010, Mendel worked as a nurse in Rocky Mount before moving to Ohio State, where she earned her master’s degree and began teaching nursing students.
In 2021, she began her doctoral program in nursing education at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where a professor introduced her to the North Carolina-Moldova Peace Partnership Program.
Mendel has been invited to join the North Carolina Nursing Moldova Collaborative and in February was invited to be the first American nurse to lecture at Moldova’s nursing school on preventive health and health promotion, an unusual move since most nursing teachers in Moldova have historically been physicians.
“Nurses are very uncertain here because we don’t have a nursing practice act, and hospitals can have as many as 30 patients,” Mendel said. “Nurses often leave very quickly for other countries where the pay is higher.”
Pirate nurse Hilary Mendel discusses patient care techniques with Moldovan nursing students. (Courtesy photo)
Mendel said she was impressed by the Moldovan nursing students’ enthusiasm for learning and the way they put it into practice, and while the concept of master’s degree nurses is still developing in Moldovan culture, she hopes that master’s degree nurses will train future generations of nurses, as is the case in the United States and other developed countries.
“They are so enthusiastic about everything we give them. It’s been such an inspiring experience. Our students couldn’t be more enthusiastic to learn because in the U.S., we take for granted that we have the opportunity to learn and grow,” Mendel said. “These students understand that it’s such an honor.”
Mendel said that learning that nurses can collect data and affect change, as they did in their doctoral studies, was an eye-opener for the Moldovan student, who graduates this summer and plans to present her doctoral thesis in October.
Hilary Mendel demonstrates safer patient care procedures to nursing students in Moldova. (Courtesy photo)
“I wanted to deepen my knowledge of nursing and grow professionally. After becoming a nurse educator, I knew the next step would be to become a nurse scientist and contribute to nursing research and knowledge development,” Mendel said.
Partnership for Peace
The North Carolina-Moldova Peace Partnership was launched shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Mendel said the U.S. State Department partnered U.S. states with former Soviet republics that were newly opening up to the West, and linked U.S. government, education and community organizations with their Moldovan partners to act as training wheels to help the developing country.
North Carolina’s National Guard was at the heart of this partnership, and outside of military assistance, the state has been one of the most successful in mentoring relationships with former Soviet bloc countries.
“Many of the old textbooks on nursing and health, and some primary school textbooks, are being shipped to Moldova on cargo ships,” Mendel said. “They are suffering from the Soviet mentality.”
According to Mendel, Nicolae Testemicanu, chair of the nursing department at the School of Pharmacy at the National Medical University of Chisinau, Moldova, translated donated U.S. nursing textbooks and developed a curriculum for an undergraduate nursing program. With support from Partnership for Peace, the educator is now starting a master’s-level nursing program and expects to enroll its first students this fall.
Mendel said very basic nursing practices, such as understanding how the body works to prevent injuries when caring for moving patients, are revolutionary concepts in Moldova. But a lack of resources and theory doesn’t mean Moldovans don’t want to progress and become part of modern Europe. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many skilled workers returned to Moldova, and the government offered incentives such as three years of maternity leave to entice young Moldovans to stay in the country.
The efforts of the Moldova State Nursing Collaborative continue as a shipment of four dozen walking belts, which aid in safe handling of nurses and patients, arrives at the U.S. Embassy for distribution to nursing students and hospitals. Mendel believes even a small scrap of fabric like the walking belts can help advance the nursing profession in Moldova and expand ECU’s service mission on a global scale.
“They don’t have a lot, but they’re working hard to do the best they can with what they have,” Mendel said.
A Lifetime of Service
Though Mendel moved to Raleigh during middle school after living in three other states, she is a native North Carolinian, graduating from Millbrook High School and receiving her school’s service award along the way, a natural result of her dedication to volunteering in the community.
Mendel is the middle child of three, and she and her sister helped their single mother care for her younger brother, who had chronic health issues that kept him in and out of the hospital.
“I always say I was afraid of blood until I started taking care of my little brother,” Mendel said, “I decided to become a nurse in middle school and was later able to secure a prestigious internship at Duke Hospital.”
As a high school student, she was hired as an assistant for an oncology research project at Duke University. She was the only one in her class interested in the grief counseling offered to the cancer patients she worked with. Some of the patients she helped were as young as 16 or 17 years old as her, and it was hard.
Mendel began majoring in pre-nursing at ECU in 2006. Due to the learning disabilities she experienced, all of her friends and family encouraged her to take an easier path, but Mendel was not one to take the easy path.
“I’m not one to take no for an answer,” Mendel said, “It just meant I had to work harder.”
During the summer between his junior and senior years, Mendel received a competitive residency opportunity working with patients with respiratory failure at what was then Pitt County Memorial Hospital, now ECU Health Medical Center. For his senior year clinical training, he was assigned to Nash General Hospital, where he remained after graduation.
Wanting to make a difference in the nursing profession, Mendel immediately began a master’s in nursing education at Kent State University in Ohio, which seemed like the best way to expand her knowledge.
“As a bedside nurse, I found I could make a difference with each patient, but patients don’t always want to get better. They can be very stubborn at times. But every time I worked with the students, I found they wanted to learn,” Mendel said. “I was energized by the fact that the students were eager to learn and I got to work with them and see the results. It was inspiring.”
As a student at Ohio State, Mendel supervised licensed practical nurse students whose opportunities for obstetrics training were limited due to a lack of clinical settings in which to practice.
Lacking clinical experience in obstetrics, Mendel learned how communities lacking access to quality health care meet challenges and utilize the resources at hand to reach the best outcomes for the sick among them.
The area of Ohio where Mendel lived and studied is home to thriving Amish communities but, by both choice and circumstance, lacks modern medical care, something Mendel experienced firsthand during a tour at an Old Order Amish birthing center.
“Through this relationship, I was able to send LPN students on clinical observations, and they came 45 minutes across the county from downtown Cleveland to get cultural immersion and experience,” Mendel said.
Mendel said that while men are traditionally responsible for childbirth in Amish communities, that’s not the reason Amish mothers are more likely to die than women. It’s the post-natal care, or lack thereof, that’s most deadly.
“The postpartum period is a very difficult time for the mother, with a lot of bleeding, and the average farmworker father doesn’t necessarily know what to look out for,” Mendel said.
By helping to overhaul the center’s medical and nursing policies, Mendel knew he could make a lasting difference: Some of the men from a patriarchal society who didn’t know how to operate a coffee machine, drove to the center in horse-drawn carriages, and had no understanding of how to combine traditional care practices with modern medical advances.
“Nurses and doctors are called in to attend the birth, but we ask about and respect their culture and preferences, and we also use the latest technology to ensure safety,” Mendel said. “We don’t do continuous fetal monitoring because the fetus wants to move around, we don’t put them in hospital gowns, and we don’t put women on IV fluids.”
Mendel also has extensive experience in disaster medicine, having volunteered with the Red Cross as a nursing student in 2009, helping to qualify nurses to run evacuation shelters after disasters, and through her doctoral research, enabling bedside lights to be installed to help older people prevent falls at night or during power outages.
“I worked in orthopedics and we had a lot of older people falling at night. This spring we gave study participants neck lamps, and we were able to secure funding for them. We know older people fall, but we don’t have the funding,” Mendel said.
