It was a great pleasure to be asked to be part of the Career Trek this year, which is hosted by Red River College. This event is geared towards grade 5 and 6 students from rural areas, who come to the college to visit several academic areas.

For the nursing Department, we had the students split up in four stations, and they had to work through related activities.

Station One was Peter Pan, who almost collided with a bird while flying.  When he was trying to avoid the collision, he fell on a tree. So in this scenario, students had to change the dressing on his arm laceration and reapply a tensor to his sprained ankle.

Station two was a hand washing station using the glow germ gel.

Station three was skeleton bones, and the students had to reconstruct the body from head to toe.

And lastly, Station four was Fiona Shrek who was admitted to the hospital having an asthma attack. For this station, we put our SIM manikin Patty to work and had the students listen to her chest sounds and administer her an inhaler while she spoke and interacted with them.

What a great experience for everyone who took part!
Thank you to everyone who helped out and made this day so memorable for them.

3rd year students in the Epidemiology and Illness Prevention course held a Health Fair in the library hallway on May 10th.

The students shared important information on various health topics to increase awareness and help the college community learn how to stay healthy. Each station had a poster, pamphlets, and a game to play, with a chance to win a prize. Students engaged their audience through activity and informal presentations.

Thanks to everyone who came out and supported the students’ practical learning!

First year students in Nursing Techniques 1301 took over the NDC library hallway today to offer blood pressure and pulse checks for students, faculty, and staff. Split into two sections, one group in the morning and one in the afternoon, the students provided these important health checks, under the supervision of RNs.

The exercise gave students an opportunity to practice their skills in more of a real world situation, rather than the skills lab. In addition to practicing the technical skills, students were also able to communicate and interact with a diverse community.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by! Not only was it good for your health, but it was great practice for our students!

Research is an integral part of the Nursing Department. From Research and Innovation Day, to an instructor writing group, to publications, the instructors in the Nursing Department continue to show their passion for and commitment to research.

Congratulations to instructors Kim Mitchell and Tom Harrigan, along with Torrie Stefansson and Holly Setlack, on their latest publication! Their article “Exploring Self-Efficacy and Anxiety in First-Year Nursing Students Enrolled in a Discipline-Specific Scholarly Writing Course” has recently been published in the Journal Quality Advancement in Nursing Education.

To read their article, click here.

Red River College is committed to enhancing mental health programming for students, staff, and faculty. On March 22nd, TSN’s Michael Landsberg presented at the college to help raise awareness of mental health through his #SICKNOTWEAK talk.

Michael is one of the faces of Bell Let’s Talk Day, in which Bell contributed 5¢ towards mental health initiatives by counting every text, call, tweet, Instagram post, Facebook video view, and Snapchat geofilter.

If you were unable to attend the live #SICKNOTWEAK presentation, you can watch it on-demand here.

Congratulations to Nursing instructor, Kim Mitchell, on receiving the Bravo Award for Research Excellence!

The Research Excellence award recognizes an individual who has made an outstanding contribution in support of applied research, contributed to establishing an environment that welcomes research, supports others in their research endeavours, and or made an outstanding contribution to a course/project/program/community partner. This award recognizes Kim’s contribution not only to nursing research but to a culture of research within the Nursing Department.

In addition to being a career nurse educator, Kim’s focus of study is a topic applicable to nursing education – exploring writing self-efficacy and its impact on writing performance in undergraduate nursing students. Writing self-efficacy is a concept that has been demonstrated to predict student grades and is thought to be a more powerful predictor of student performance than writing ability. Writing assignments are thought to contribute to student knowledge and critical thinking skills, which has the potential to positively affect student ability to communicate within multidisciplinary teams using the language of evidenced informed practice. Additionally, writing assignments are thought to benefit student ability to integrate theoretical knowledge within their clinical experiences; however, there has been little empirical testing to explore this hypothesis within the discipline of nursing.

Kim’s interest in exploring writing self-efficacy in nursing students began in 2011 when she initiated a pilot study to assess the effectiveness of the discipline specific scholarly writing course that she developed for the RRC nursing baccalaureate program.  The study was a pretest posttest design study, which measured writing self-efficacy and anxiety in first year students before and after their first-year scholarly writing course.  The description of this study and the course content it investigates has been accepted and will be published in the journal Quality Advancements in Nursing Education for spring 2017.

In 2013, she repeated this initial study and expanded the original one group quasi-experimental design to include a time control period. A comparison between online and classroom writing instruction experiences was also assessed. A portion of this cohort of students also participated in a long-term follow up study in the 2015-2016 academic year and that project is currently in data analysis.  With a team of colleagues, Kim has also conducted an in-depth analysis of existing writing self-efficacy tools published in the literature in order to understand the conceptual constructs used to measure writing self-efficacy. This project has been accepted by the Journal of Nursing Measurement to be published along with an editorial on the subject in or around August 2017.

It became evident, after four research projects in this area, that doctoral education was the next step in the advancement of Kim’s research knowledge and skills. She applied and was accepted to the doctor of nursing program at the University of Manitoba for the fall of 2016. She is currently completing coursework toward this goal. The writing self-efficacy tool used to measure the concept in her three previous studies was one of her own creation and was designed to measure aspects of writing self-efficacy specific to the scholarly writing course she was delivering. As a result, her goal in the doctoral program is to redevelop and test this scale for more general use within nursing education. One of her first doctoral assignments exploring academic writing voice from the perspectives of objectivity and feminism has been accepted for publication in Nursing Inquiry.

Ever wonder how you can create a flipped classroom?

Nursing instructors Sandy Alguire and Monica Burfoot, along with recently retired course leader, Wilma Schroeder, have created a flipped classroom in family nursing education. The International Family Nursing Association recently highlighted the implementation of this model by our instructors, as well as the benefits that it creates for their students.

To learn more, read the article here.

Missed last week’s mindfulness presentation? Watch it on-demand! Click the image to view:

TGIF… Not only was it the final Friday of the term before exams, but many Nursing faculty took the opportunity to attend a presentation on Mindfulness.  This Lunch and Learn was presented by Vidhu Bhanot from Counselling and Accessibility at Red River College. It was a perfect way to spend an hour learning about mindfulness meditation, what it is, and how it can be so beneficial for our students… and ourselves.

Mindfulness is a form of mental exercise that can cultivate self-awareness, self-regulation, and self-compassion. Vidhu shared the results of her Mindfulness Group Pilot study involving a small group of Nursing students. After engaging in regular mindfulness techniques and activities, students found they were able to manage stress in a healthier way. Another benefit (although unintended) was the effect of creating healthier family relationships.

We engaged in a breathing practice exercise led by Vindhu, breathing in through the nose (4 seconds), holding our breath (7 seconds), and then slowly exhaling (8 seconds). The trick, we were told, was to keep the exhale longer than the inhale so as to initiate a vagus nerve response. By doing this, we can interrupt the body’s own stress response.

It was very interesting to learn about the history of mindfulness and its application to stress and pain management.  Hopefully we can incorporate more mindfulness into our own lives and educate our students to help them manage the stresses of school/life. Training our minds is not easy – we must be kind and keep practicing. Meanwhile… “Happy Break Week!”

Third year nursing students shared their health education promotion posters on Wednesday February 8th. The posters showcased health concerns prevalent in Manitoba as the students shared their knowledge with RRC faculty, staff, and students on prevention and how to keep healthy. Thank you to everyone who took the time to stop and interact with our students!