Name: Deb Donald
Job Title: Indigenous Patient Navigator
Length of Service: 17.5 years
Worksite: Royal Inland Hospital
Community: Kamloops
Ancestral Territory: Simpcw First Nation
Favourite Quote / Advice to Live By: “A drum made of heart will call the spirits that are concerned with the human heart. The heart symbolizes essence. The heart is one of the few essential organs humans and animals must have to live. Remove one kidney, the human lives. Additionally, take both legs, the gallbladder, one lung, one arm, and the spleen; the human lives. Not well perhaps, but there is life. Take away certain brain functions and the human still lives. Take the heart, the person is gone instantly.”
As an Indigenous Patient Navigator (IPN), Deb Donald has spent time in nearly every area of Royal Inland Hospital. There are few places in the hospital she hasn’t been.
And she wouldn’t want it any other way.
“Every day is different,” she notes. “As I am walking into work, I am wondering what I will get today. I float the whole hospital, so I could be anywhere at any given time. I get my steps in each day. I recall a day where I was doing a viewing for a family in the morning and then helping deliver a baby in the afternoon.”
