Vera Lebedeva Memorial
Vera Lebedeva was Director of Nursing at the Moscow Branch of the Russian Red Cross. She had a long career as a community nurse, working in 
difficult circumstances to provide care and improve the well-being of some of the most disadvantaged people in Russia. She fought to provide not just nursing care, but shelter, food and education for homeless and street children in Moscow. More recently, her work centred on the needs of older people living alone.
Vera showed great leadership and courage, being personally involved in delivering care to those caught up in the Moscow theatre siege and the Beslan school siege, and in training nurses in war-torn Chechnya.
Vera visited the UK and secured funding from the Department for International Development for a joint project with Age Concern England to improve the delivery of home nursing services for older people in Moscow. This developed community nursing training programmes which have already been completed by over 300 community-based Red Cross Nurses. She was made a Fellow of the QNI and after her premature death in 2006, the QNI launched the bursary to enable community nurses to follow in her footsteps and travel between Moscow and the UK to learn from each other.
QNI Chair Rosalynde Lowe and Jean Rowe were technical advisors on this project, working closely with Vera and her colleagues to ensure the project’s success, and that it was sustainable after the funding came to an end.
Vera’s achievements were recognised nationally and internationally: in 2004 she was awarded one of the International Red Cross’s highest awards – the Florence Nightingale Award for Excellence. She was only the second Russian to win this prestigious award.
2008 Bursary holders
Accompanied by their interpreter Olga Zinoveva, two Russian nurses, Elena Perfilyeva and Irina Ostrovskaya visited London in May 2008 for a two week programme of observation, learning and sharing knowledge. Elena is Director of Community Nursing at the Moscow Red Cross and Irina lectures in nursing at the Sechenov Medical Academy.
In autumn of 2008 two British nurses, Caroline McGraw and Janice Roberts, travelled to Moscow and St Petersburg to visit nursing facilities there. Caroline is a district nurse working for Islington PCT and Janice Roberts is a community matron from Central Surrey Health. Their visit will be featured in a forthcoming article in the Nursing Standard (27 May 2009).
