Kathy Van Dusen, MSN, RN, CEN, CPEN, NHDP-BC

Kathy Van Dusen’s enduring and substantial contributions to emergency nursing practice are in practice, specifically disaster nursing. She is passionate about serving those who live in at-risk settings during and after disasters. She spent the last 17 years serving on several DMAT deployments bringing principles of disaster medicine to locations such as Fiji where she trained Navy corpsmen or in Peru and Ecuador where she set up a triage system on the USNS Comfort. In addition, after coordinating care for 250 cruise ship passengers who were being held under federal quarantine related to COVID-19, she became a sought-after expert on reducing COVID exposures in health care providers, which helped protect more than 6,000 health care providers in California. Van Dusen seeks to inspire emergency nurses to be prepared to respond to any disaster scenario. She is with the CA1 DMAT, as well as being the clinical practice specialist for Conference Education with the American Association of Critical Care Nurses.