Photographer Fiona McDougall, working on assignment to document the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Children's Hospital, captured this image for AJN' s photojournalism contest, The Faces of Caring: Nurses at Work.
McDougall, a photographer with OneWorld Communications in California, spent three days at the hospital, located on three floors tucked into the vast UCSF Medical Center, photographing doctors, nurses, patients, and volunteers, as well as the physical setting of the 150-bed facility, which has birthing rooms with panoramic views of San Francisco, large murals on many walls, and specialty units that include a seven-bed pediatric bone marrow transplantation unit.
In this photograph, pediatric nurse practitioner Sherry Ottaway assists new parents with their one-day-old infant at the Center for Mothers and Newborns in the UCSF Children's Hospital.
"I was fortunate to be allowed to photograph very special and intimate moments, and sometimes very ill children and their parents-children with cancer, children in intensive care, premature babies, bone marrow patients," she says. "Throughout my time I witnessed a warm and caring atmosphere that I hope comes through in the images."
McDougall, a 1993 Pulitzer Prize nominee for photographing the crisis in Somalia for the New York Times, has traveled to many remote locations and has been published in Time, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, and the Los Angeles Times, among others.