The Brisbane pair, Ruth Jebb and Barbara McMaster, learnt on Saturday of their Florence Nightingale honour after earlier receiving the Red Cross International Service Medal. The Florence Nightingale Medal is the highest award given to aid workers in conflict zones by the International Red Cross.

British nurse Florence Nightingale in the 1850s became known as the "Lady of the Lamp" for her reforming nursing of British soldiers during the Crimean War.

Princess Alexandra Hospital emergency department clinical nurse consultant Ruth Jebb was inspired by her father's mission work in sub-Sahara Africa to become an aid worker.

"He had been to Africa a couple of times and he had come back with stories of the need over there," Ms Jebb said.

"So apparently at five years of age I said I wanted to go help children in Africa and I said I wanted to become a nurse."

Ms Jebb grew up and graduated from nursing in Canberra, lived in Israel and - after several false starts - eventually in 2002 gained the remote area experience as a nurse to be offered a place as an international aid worker.

In the past 15 years, she has now served 12 International Red Cross missions including Sudan, Kenya, Chad, Haiti, the Philippines and Nepal.

She almost died when an earthquake hit Nepal and was carjacked in South Sudan.

"My whole life is a walking contrast," she laughs.

"I can rough it with the best of them but I also like my niceties."

In 2005 she worked for nine months at the Lokichokio Red Cross field hospital in Kenya on the border with South Sudan where hundreds of thousands have crossed the border to flee fighting in South Sudan.

"It was my first mission... We were working alongside local nurses, nurses aides and theatre assistant and helping to train them to run the hospital," she said.

"It was a 600-bed hospital and at the time that I was there it was functioning at about 400 beds." *

Nursing staff simply divided their resources between those who had been shot and injured and those who were struggling because their families were torn apart by the war.

From here, Ms Jebb spent 12 months in Darfur in Sudan, repeatedly described as the world's worst humanitarian crisis, in a medical camp holding 147,000 people.

"It really is one of the most dangerous places in the world," she said, describing sleeping in a guarded home.

At one stage she and her driver were carjacked.

"A local driver was driving me after I had finished my morning shift at the feeding centre and my car was taken just as it pulled up to the house where I was staying," she said.

"The driver hadn't told me that this guy had been following us for 25 minutes from the feeding centre. His goal was just to get me safely to the house and to get me there safely. But it was when we stopped the car that this guy came up to the car with an AK-47 and pointed it at my driver's head."

"He just wanted the International Red Cross-labelled four-wheel-drive," she explained matter-of factly.

In Lokichokio, she felt the Red Cross had the resources it needed.

But in Darfur, she said she frequently felt overwhelmed.

"I felt there was not enough hours in the day. There wasn't enough resources to help everybody. You just felt like you were failing each and every day."

But nothing compared to the day in April 2015 when Ms Jebb arrived in Nepal as a second massive earthquake struck Kathmandu. Almost 9000 had died in the first quake.

"I landed in Nepal about five days after the initial earthquake and was making my way to the Red Cross Headquarters in Kathmandu when the second earthquake hit," she said.

"I thought I was going to die, to be honest," she said.

The taxi screeched to a halt in the middle of the intersection, the driver ran screaming and Ms Jebb watched from the front seat as huge cracks began to appear in the middle of the road in front of her.

"People began to climb on top of the car I was in, which was quite frightening," she said.

"And the car was rocking so violently on the road."

"I had no idea what to do."

"And minutes later, it was over and my driver re-emerged and we went on the headquarters."

Her nursing colleague Barbara McMaster recently worked to fight Ebola in Sierra Leone and spent years nursing for the International Red Cross in South Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen.

The pair both worked at the Princess Alexandra Hospital's emergency department although Barbara has recently left to work with a specialist travel doctor.

"She is an amazing lady, an incredible lady," Ms Jebb said of Ms McMaster.

Ms Jebb was still surprised as she fed her seven-month old baby Harvey on Saturday morning while she was interviewed 30 minutes after learning of her Florence Nightingale Medal.

"It's an award that you associate with people that have done incredible things and who are standouts internationally, not even locally," she said.

"But it's really the reason why you get into the profession, because you look up to the nurses that have won those awards."

*CORRECTION: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the hospital was functioning at about 4000 beds.