ARCSON Student Steps Up for Community Health

By Raissa Batakji

Tania El Sayegh leads campaign to create mental health awareness, while offering practical advice across the board.

When nursing student Tania El Sayegh went into lockdown mode as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, she found it difficult to spend her days passively scrolling through social media. Driven by a strong sense for serving the community, she quickly turned to her faculty at the Alice Ramez Chagoury School of Nursing (ARCSON) for help and guidance, and sprang to action.

“As an aspiring nurse, I know that our primary role is to spread education,” declared El Sayegh, who had welcomed every opportunity to do so. Being a scholar of the LAU University Scholarship Program meant that she was further inspired to take on community health projects, thanks to a vast number of skill-building workshops she had attended.

When the pandemic struck, compounded with the Lebanese economic and political crises, El Sayegh identified the strain it was placing on individuals’ mental health. Joining forces with some friends and classmates, she organized online sessions to spread awareness about mental health, on coping mechanisms to deal with uncertainty and healthy practices to adopt during the pandemic.

“It all started with a public invitation for nursing students, which then spread to students from other majors, and on to some of their parents who came across our social media posts,” explained El Sayegh.

Through this experience, El Sayegh is mostly grateful for having learned, first-hand, how her role as a nurse transcends bedside care and the traditional hospital setting. “Apart from having gained valuable knowledge on how to protect my own mental health and properly invest my time, I opened up to other forms of online learning and completed a number of certified trainings,” she added.

El Sayegh was recently invited by her professor to speak at a webinar on breastfeeding during the pandemic and had collaborated with the Lebanese Red Cross on a community webinar to better address the COVID-19 through training and direct application.

She looks forward to making the most of the opportunities that a career in nursing can offer.