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Meet Bertukan Zerihun, head nurse of the Pediatric Department at Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem. Today, she oversees the 44 nurses in the department, the area’s largest, one that’s so busy she’s had to create satellite units on other floors.
"The work is challenging; there's a lot of it, but I love it. At the end of every day, I know we’ve done lifechanging work.” Her motto: "Nothing is too hard. You can always find a solution."
"Since Covid-19, we are at full capacity all the time," she said about Hadassah Ein Kerem’s Pediatrics Department, on the third floor of the Charlotte R. Bloomberg Mother and Child Center at Hadassah Ein Kerem. In the past seven months, with the measles outbreak in Jerusalem, she added a nine-bed extension of the department on the fourth floor. It’s a specially adapted room for children with highly contagious diseases, designed to prevent airborne transmission.
Faced with so many cases, she and her colleagues actively educate and advocate to promote vaccinations. In November, she represented Hadassah’s nursing leadership at a Knesset Committee for the Rights of the Child discussion. She spoke about Hadassah’s frontline experience treating children during the outbreak, sharing data from the wards — including the complex cases and intensive care needs of some young patients. Bertukan emphasized the urgent need for better public education and improved access to vaccinations.
“We never judge anyone,” she said. “But when parents are informed of the real dangers of measles, they are usually eager to vaccinate their children.”
As head nurse, her job includes finding solutions for families in distress. Recently, a mother whose child was hospitalized in the department was faced with the difficulty of having to leave her older son with special needs at home. Zerihun found the patient a room in the hospital in which she could stay with her older son while her younger son was taken care of.
She provides her nurses with a program that provides them with the opportunity to present academic papers and case presentations. "They are always learning, advancing and implementing what they know," said Zerihun, who is working on her own research project tied to measles.
She was born in Gondar, Ethiopia, where her mother was a famous nurse, and her father was both a school principal and a medical practitioner.
When she moved to Israel as a child, the transition was jarring. As a brand-new immigrant in 1988, Zerihun changed her Amharic first name after one of her teachers told her that Bertukan was too hard to pronounce. The most popular girl in her school was called Penina, and so Bertukan became Penina, although at home she was too embarrassed to tell her parents. Growing up in Herzliya, she and her brother were the only Ethiopian immigrants in school, where they met with curiosity and sometimes insults.
Despite the hurdles, Zerihun became a star student, reclaiming her given name at age 16 and eventually opting to follow in her mother’s footsteps. In 2006, she earned her bachelor’s degree, and today she has a master’s of science in nursing from the Henrietta Szold Hadassah-Hebrew University School of Nursing, supported by the Ahotenu (Our Nurses) scholarship program funded by Hadassah for those of Ethiopian origin.
She’s a Hadassah nurse through and through. In the little free time she does have, the married mother of four spends quality time with her own mother, walks in her beloved Jerusalem and does Pilates. And every year, she marks International Nurses Day by hosting a barbecue for her staff at her home.
Today, compassion and professionalism guide her staff. Zerihun daily reminds her nurses: "Be kind and be good."
