About evanna
Evanna's Story
A native of County Dublin, Ireland, Evanna Brennan RN, took her training in Temple Street Children's Hospital, Dublin & St. Vincent's Hospital, Dublin. She has worked as a home care nurse with her teammate Susan Giles for the last twenty-five years and they have addressed the needs of the residents of the challenging area of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
In 1997 she was chosen as one of thirty-three nurses across Canada for the Canadian HIV/AIDS Nursing Mentorship program funded by Health Canada. In this role she educated and supported nurses from across the country who were grappling with the complexities of caring for an increasingly multi-diagnosed (IVDU, HIV/AIDS, mental illness) population. She is a long-standing member of the Canadian Association of Nurses in AIDS Care. In 1999 she was co-recipient (with Susan Giles) of CANAC’s Jill Sullivan Award of Excellence in HIV/AIDS Nursing.
Compassion
In the mid 1990s, as the HIV epidemic began in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, Evanna and Susanbegan receiving referrals to provide home care nursing services to a chaotic, street involved clientele living and dying with HIV/AIDS. They consulted and collaborated with inner city nurses in San Francisco, Amsterdam and Montreal. Combined with gritty field experience, they developed a model "Action Based Care" that defines principles and approaches to providing effective, ethical nursing care to such a population with a goal of removing barriers to care. They have field-taught student nurses from UBC; community health nurses from across Canada, and HIV nurse clinicians from Japan.
"Go to where they're at."
Evanna and Susan recognized that typical home-care nursing methods did not fit this patient population, so they adapted the process to work in these circumstances. Their patients would not go to clinics, so they would track them down and bring care to them. Sometimes that meant asking someone’s drug dealer where to find them, or dressing a wound in a bar.
more than 40 years of watching over us.
