Based on the 2017 Canadian Survey on Disability, more than two million Canadians 15 years of age or older are living with a mental health-related disability. Subsequently, access and delivery of mental health services in Canada, more specifically in Ontario, have shifted to a shared responsibility between healthcare providers and the individual client's informal caregivers. Unfortunately, the role of the caregiver has been historically underappreciated and undervalued, leaving caregivers with few supports to help them manage and cope with caregiving responsibilities. This paper reports the results of a qualitative descriptive study that explored the lived experiences of caregivers who are providing care to an adult family member who is living with a mental illness in Windsor-Essex County, Ontario. Twenty-one participants volunteered to be interviewed for this study via telephone or online on Microsoft Teams. All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Data analysis followed Braun and Clarke's framework for reflexive thematic analysis. Four themes were identified from the 21 interviews: 1) personal impact of being a caregiver, 2) stress associated with navigating the system, 3) complexity of the caregiving burden, and 4) caregivers as buffers of the failings of the system. Results demonstrate that caregiving is a stressful responsibility and, without sufficient supports, can impair the wellbeing of both the caregiver and the care recipient. As such, apart from recognizing informal caregivers as partners in the care of persons living with mental illness in the community, there is also a need to acknowledge that they, too, require supports to ensure that their health and well-being are not compromised in providing care to their loved one(s).
Maintaining cultural safety during advance care planning (ACP) discussions is an essential component of holistic care provision. Most nurses feel unprepared to engage in ACP and the current literature offers limited recommendations on how nurses can lead culturally safe ACP discussions. Internationally educated nurses (IENs) have unique personal and professional experiences to address this gap.
Background: Strong nursing faculty is paramount to promote disciplinary leadership and to prepare future nurses for practice. Our understanding of the factors associated with or predictive of nurse faculty retention and/or turnover is lacking. Purpose: The aim of this review is to identify and synthesize the existing literature on factors contributing to nurse faculty shortage in Canada and implications on nursing practice. Methods: A scoping review based on the Arskey and O’Malley’s five stage framework for scoping reviews was undertaken. Utilising the PRISMA protocol, a comprehensive and structured literature search was conducted in five databases of studies published in English.Findings: Limited through search inclusion and relevance of research, nine studies out of 220 papers met the criteria for this review and were thematically analyzed. Identified themes were: supply versus demand; employment conditions; organizational support; and personal factors.Discussion: Impending retirement of faculty, unsupportive leadership, and stressful work environments were frequently reported as significant contributing factors to the faculty shortage.Conclusions: This scoping review provide insights into how Canada’s schools of nursing could engage in grounded efforts to lessen nursing faculty shortage, both nationally and globally. We identified a gap in the literature that indicates that foundational work is needed to create context-specific solutions. The limited studies published in Canada suggests that this is a critical area for future research and funding.
Internationally educated nurses’ (IENs) transition to practice in a new country is facilitated by education programs, commonly known as “bridging programs.” IENs experiences and understanding of interprofessional collaboration, essential in today’s health care environment, is often overlooked in education and research. Therefore, this mixed methods study sought to understand the experiences of IENs enrolled in a practical nursing bridging program at an urban community college in Canada. Findings indicate a need to address IENs’ understanding of interprofessional collaboration in their entry-to-practice education to optimize their role in the receiving country’s health care system.
This chapter provides an overview of the history of nursing professionalisation in Canada and Ontario, and the findings of the CWKE Ontario RN case study. It draws on our survey and a number of sets of qualitative data gathered. We discuss some of the differences in experience amongst registered nurses along the lines of class, gender and visible minority status. We focus on shifts in professional work and organisational change that have been introduced in other chapters by attending to issues of (1) workplace authority and autonomy; (2) work experiences; and 3) skill, knowledge, and workplace learning amongst Ontario's RNs. Our findings indicate that forces bearing down on the nursing profession in Ontario can be described in relation to two dynamics which we see as both closely related to each other and closely related to class processes unfolding within the profession: hybridisation and de-professionalisation and perhaps even proletarianisation.
Despite good evidence that supports improved clinical health outcomes and the cost effectiveness of nurse-pharmacist collaboration for promoting medication safety among adults in acute care settings, there is limited research in community settings. This scoping review examines, maps, and identifies gaps in the existing literature on nurse-pharmacist collaboration to augment medication safety among community-dwelling adults. Setting(s): Community setting This review consists of 3,464 participants across 23 studies We used the enhanced Arksey and O'Malley framework by Levac and colleagues. Studies from MEDLINE, CINAHL, ProQuest, Scopus, and PubMed databases implementing medication safety through nurse-pharmacist collaboration for community-dwelling adults were included. We extracted data according to country of origin, intervention, and relevance to the current review. Twenty-three studies were included in this review. Nurse-pharmacist collaborations in community settings are still evolving and are in a nascent form. Five sub-themes emerged from literature review of collaboration between nurses and pharmacists in community settings for medication safety. They are creating new opportunities to address gaps in community medication safety, enabling complementary interprofessional roles in medication safety, facilitating of efficient and cost-effective measures for medication safety, diverse nature of assessments done by nurses and pharmacists, and incohesive teams due to poor collaborative practices. Nurse-pharmacist collaborations in community settings improved disease management, prevented adverse drug events, and reduced hospitalizations. They resulted in early identification and correction of medication safety related issues, reduced wait periods to see general practitioners, and enhanced chronic disease self-management skills among community-dwelling adults. There is a need to improve existing systems and policies through research for sustaining such collaborations especially in community settings.