Nurse Saio Kumalah-Bah Helps the Underserved in Boston and in Her Native Sierra Leone
There are two main reasons Saio Kumalah-Bah loves her job as a nurse manager at Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program: her colleagues and her patients. In 2008, Saio began her career at BHCHP as a nurse at the Barbara McInnis House, our medical respite facility. For the past decade, she has applied her skills at the Boston Medical Center/Jean Yawkey Place (BMC/JYP) clinic, the largest of our clinics. She learned about Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program from a co-worker at her previous job, who worked per diem at BHCHP and thought she had the skills and temperament to thrive here.
Her co-workers are collegial, down-to-earth, and helpful, says Saio, who immigrated to the United States in 1988 from Sierra Leone, a country on the west coast of Africa. In some medical practices, there’s a hierarchy between nurses and providers — physician assistants, nurse practitioners, and doctors. Not at BHCHP, where providers have an easy rapport with nurses. “It’s a very friendly environment. We all work together to meet the patients’ needs,” says Saio. “Providers want to be called by their first name and they’re always open to questions and to help out. I feel well-supported by my coworkers and the administration.”
The BMC/JYP clinic is our busiest. “It’s like urgent care with anything and everything,” explains Saio. She and her team triage patients, then tend to the many ailments they’re trained to treat. For patients needing a higher level of care, Saio will put them on the schedule of a provider — often for a same-day appointment. The care at BHCHP is more holistic than that of your typical medical practice. If a patient comes in for a blood sugar check, the nurse will likely have a list of health issues to address while the patient is there. “I love taking care of people,” Saio says. “Every day someone comes to you with a different thing going on. The care is so complex.”
Clinic nurses treat wounds, perform immunizations, and do all kinds of referrals — to detox programs; BHCHP’s HIV, Hepatitis C, and office-based addiction (OBAT) teams: or to the Barbara McInnis House. They also help patients manage their medications. People who live on the street or in shelters often find it difficult to keep their medicines secure and take them regularly. So the BMC/JYP clinic nurses store patients’ medications in the clinic and help them refill their pill organizers. As the top administrator on her team, Saio also creates the staff schedule, onboards new team members, and mentors nurses.
In addition to nursing, Saio is also passionate about a non-profit she started a decade ago at the urging of a countryman she knew through their work with Boston’s Sierra Leone community. Koinadugu Development Corporation’s mission is to improve education in one of the poorest districts in Sierra Leone — the northern area where Saio hails from. The nonprofit has sent textbooks, school uniforms, and most recently 24 computers to the Kabala Secondary School, Saio’s alma mater. The computers are the school’s first. The nonprofit also installed solar panels because the school did not have electricity to run the computers. Ultimately, Saio hopes her nonprofit will build a university in the district. To learn more about Koinadugu Development Corporation, visit kdckabala.org.
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