Yanti Turang | Frontline nurse – taking on COVID-19 and becoming a leader in global healthcare

What She Did Next

*Content warning: This episode contains mentions of death and grief, so please consider this before listening, particularly if you might find this triggering. In Australia, you can call Lifeline on 13 11 14 to access 24-hour crisis support.

Our guest today is Yanti Turang and she’s a registered nurse from Australia who lives in the US, where she has spent the past year working on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic.

She’s also the founder and executive director of LearnToLive, a global health not-for-profit she started in response to seeing her own family members in Indonesia suffering from chronic and preventable illnesses.

But Yanti didn’t start out as a healthcare worker. In fact, in her 20s, after taking off from Australia to see the world, she was playing in a rock’n’roll band and touring the US… when suddenly Hurricane Katrina hit her adopted city of New Orleans.

Seeing the devastation around her, it was the prompt Yanti needed to rethink her direction in life and she decided to go back to university to study nursing. She’s since gone on to become a respected leader in the public health space and is soon to write a book about her journey.

In this episode, Yanti talks about making the leap to the healthcare sector, her experiences working in hospitals and clinics around the world, what she’s learned from setting up her own not-for-profit organisation, and the hardest and most rewarding moments of her frontline work in the battles against COVID-19 and Ebola.

LINKS

Find out more about LearnToLive: https://learntoliveglobal.org/

CREDITS

Host and producer: Jacqui Ooi

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What She Did Next acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of the Land on which this podcast is recorded and produced, the Cammeraygal people of the Eora nation and the Wodi Wodi people of the Dharawal nation. We pay our respects to their Elders, past, present and emerging.

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