A Newcastle nurse swapped life as the busy manager of a city emergency hospital to work in rural and remote places across the globe.

Red Cross nurse and aid worker Libby Bowell is working in the Solomon Islands as part of a three-year health and hygiene project in some of the country’s most remote and difficult to access communities.

Ms Bowell, 49, left her job at the John Hunter Hospital after meeting two remote area nurses, who are now counted among her best friends.

"I thought – my God, there’s this whole other world that I don’t know about," she said.

"I worked in the Northern Territory for eight years and it just seemed a natural transition to work internationally for the Red Cross."

Ms Bowell has since been deployed to disasters ranging from the Kenyan floods in 2006 and 2007 to the 2004 Aceh tsunami, cholera outbreaks in New Guinea and also the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

"Haiti was a fantastic experience. It was hard work and really quite devastating, just the enormity of it and just that people had lost everything," she said.

"Medically, it was exciting and challenging."

A nurse with almost 30 years’ experience, Ms Bowell is now working to eradicate malaria, diarrhoea and other diseases as part of the international aid organisation’s Together For Healthy Communities project.

"It’s been really successful because we are using picture-based tools," she said.

"These are pictures drawn by local artists. It’s about breaking stuff down into pictures and empowering people with the knowledge to make the changes for themselves."

Ms Bowell, who also works for CRANAplus, said her experiences had helped her hone and build on the skills she developed while working in emergency.

"Living and working in these environments is incredibly rewarding because you become part of the community that you are living in and working on," she said.

"I think the rewards outweigh the frustrations."