Aurora College nursing students share their research

Yellowknife’s Explorer Hotel was bustling with eager learners and knowledge-sharing on Wednesday morning.

More than 100 students and staff from Aurora College’s School of Health and Human Services attended Northern Health Research Day, where 24 fourth-year nursing students presented their research projects.

Among them was Desiree Dolphin, who explored whether virtual care is culturally safe.

She said she is from Wrigley, which, like many communities in the NWT, has limited access to in-person healthcare staff.

“I thought in my mind, oh, that’d be great to have virtual care. Then you always have access to a nurse or MD,” she said. “Upon research, it showed that there is a lot of barriers that would have to be broken.”

She said that includes challenges maintaining therapeutic relationships, trauma caused by systemic racism in the healthcare system, technology literacy and language.

To overcome those obstacles, she recommends more community engagement, inclusion of traditional Indigenous practices in the development of virtual care, the building of trusting relationships, and training and education for healthcare providers about Indigenous history, values and practices.

Alexa Thomson said her Hay River preceptorship – a period of training involving a student and a more experienced practitioner – inspired her to look into the barriers healthcare providers can face in providing harm reduction supplies like safe inhalation kits.

“It weighs really heavily on nurses, especially treating someone for an overdose in the ER and then immediately sending them home with all the tools to do it again,” Thomson said.

“I was wondering if that’s something that’s helping elsewhere and what we can do to support our staff in actually distributing those kits, so that they can get to the people that need them.”

Thomson found a lack of policies, resources and support for nurses to effectively distribute harm reduction supples.

“There’s definitely a huge gap in harm reduction and there’s also a huge gap in understanding why harm reduction is so important,” she said.

Thomson said there’s a need to better support, recognize and resource front-line workers and supply consistent education on harm reduction across Canada.

She recommended building connections while maintaining boundaries with clients and creating support networks to relieve pressure on emergency rooms.

Katie Prince examined the blending of traditional Indigenous healing with modern harm reduction practices.

“I wanted to focus specifically on blending them rather than just replacing one or the other because both of them, together, kind-of address the physical and medical needs of the Indigenous patient – and also address their values and spiritual needs as well,” she said.

Prince said using solely a medical approach can be ineffective for Indigenous people due to intergenerational trauma, which she said is one of the leading factors contributing to substance use disorders.

She recommended cultural training and education for healthcare workers, which she said can address racist microaggressions, stereotypes and biases.

“I think this is really important, especially for nurses that work here – any healthcare workers that come from a different place around the world, around Canada, that aren’t really aware of Indigenous culture, Indigenous practices,” she said.

Prince said she was interested in exploring the topic as she is Indigenous and her father works in addictions treatment.

“It really just sparked my interest on learning more about it, because I didn’t know about any programs like this in Canada.”

Shawna Gillis said she was curious about how lack of sleep could be connected to dementia.

“I do work part-time for the Alzheimer Society here in Yellowknife and we deal a lot with care partners, people living with dementia, but I don’t see as much on the risk for dementia out there,” she said.

“I wanted to know a little bit about what the risks are and how we can get that awareness out.”

Gillis said literature indicates that both insomnia and sleeping less than five hours a night can double the risk of developing dementia. She added that sleep deprivation impairs the clearance of plaques from the brain during REM sleep, which is a main feature of Alzheimer’s disease.

“Your sleep is very important,” she said.

Gillis recommended that people get at least six to eight hours of sleep a night, promptly treat insomnia, and make sure they are getting light exposure, especially in the winter.

Other research topics nursing students presented included uterine pain and reducing disincentives for choosing IUD contraception, whether cultural safety training could influence immunization decisions, vitamin D deficiency and tuberculosis, mentorship for immigrant nurses, and healthcare provider bias and undertreatment of pain.

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