Nursing professor teaches lifesaving practices to healthcare workers in Eswatini

For eight days in July, Liberty University School of Nursing professor Dr. Stacy Taylor shared her expertise by teaching Basic Life Support and Advanced Cardiac Life Support certification to staff at The Luke Commission, a Christian nonprofit healthcare organization in the small southeastern African country of Eswatini.

Taylor has led many nursing students on trips to Africa, mainly to Rwanda during Spring Break. She led the school’s first trip to Eswatini to volunteer with The Luke Commission last year. While there this past March, Taylor offered training in BLS for over 80 staff members, and she casually mentioned she’d be open to returning over the summer to train more. After hearing that an in-country provider quoted the Luke Commission an “astronomical amount” to do the trainings, Taylor felt the call to return a few months later.

In July, she trained 84 individuals in BLS and 43 of their nurses and doctors in ACLS — all free of charge.

Taylor recalled the day she was summoned to the organization’s hospital to help treat a patient with an irregular heart rate, providing an on-site training session.

“It was an amazing opportunity to not just teach it in the classroom but then have a real patient right there,” she said. “They actually videotaped me as I was teaching their staff as I helped the patient. It wasn’t just the book knowledge they were receiving; it was applying it to this patient, and I was able to educate them in real time.”

The field of nursing is a direct pathway to touching lives and seeking healing for those in hardship. Taylor said teaching others to become skilled nurses is a way to expand that impact exponentially, equipping students and professionals to be the hands and feet of Jesus.

“When I was a bedside nurse in the ICU, I could only really touch maybe two patients a day, so I would take care of them and their family,” she said. “By teaching in nursing, I have about 200 students a year that I personally teach, and so if each of them cares for two people each day, that reaches much more people.”

She said she views her calling as a teacher as “being a good steward of where God has had me in life and how He’s trained me and how He’s prepared me. Now I can go out and train more Champions for Christ, whether that’s here locally on campus or around the world.”

Taylor will return to Eswatini and The Luke Commission with Liberty nursing students in March 2027.