Editor's note: This story initially appeared in the Spring/Summer 2022 issue of Duke Nursing magazine.

As a nurse, Steven Powell, MSN’19, likes helping people recover from illness or injury. He also likes helping communities recover from disaster. As a nurse and clinical advisor for Client Success at Elemeno Health, he does both.

Powell works with the VA’s Disaster Emergency Medical Personnel System (DEMPS), and in that role, he periodically responds to calls to travel to other communities and help out in the aftermath of a disaster, such as an earthquake, hurricane, or COVID-19 spike.

“DEMPS has been one of the most rewarding experiences in my nursing career,” he says.

In the past couple of years, he’s been deployed to Puerto Rico, New Orleans, Dallas, and Little Rock. In each deployment, he spent two weeks working daily 12-hour shifts in a local VA.

“Every one of those missions, I’ve been very grateful for the opportunity to be a part of recovery and be a part of relief,” he says, “but my most recent deployment to New Orleans was like a homecoming for me because, of all the cities I’ve lived in, New Orleans was the first city that I got to pick.”

Powell, who is Peruvian-American, grew up all around the world, including stints in Qatar, Malaysia, Russia, and Argentina. As a high school student, he decided he wanted to attend college in New Orleans in part because the city was recovering from Hurricane Katrina and he wanted to contribute to that process. He’s drawn to disaster response because of a desire to serve. His grandfather, who passed away last year, served in the military.

“The interactions I had with him really inspired me to want to continue that act of service,” he says.

Powell, a self-described people person, says his well-traveled childhood and multicultural heritage help him relate to patients in VA hospitals, who come from a wide variety of backgrounds and often have served overseas in areas near where he’s lived. And his experience in the VA helps him relate to patients in different communities during DEMPS deployments.

“As nurses we interact with many different patients on a regular basis,” he says, “and that experience translates into being able to best serve those in different communities who are going through trauma and [to meet] their individual recovery needs.”