Wendy transitioned to a research career after a rewarding clinical career as a registered nurse

Transcript

Okay thank you, I’m a researcher and an Associate Professor at the University of Ottawa and the School of Nursing and I do patient orientated research predominantly with different indigenous communities now but my story starts back when I was a clinical nurse. I’m a registered nurse and I was a clinical nurse and I worked in outpost communities in the Yukon Territory living and working in First Nations communities working as a nurse practitioner. After that intensive and long and very, very rewarding clinical career then I went into do my PhD, my Masters and PhD and became a researcher and started another career.

So what’s really lovely for me at this stage is that my research has all moved to be involving Indigenous communities and having had a clinical career working and living with them it’s brought the two worlds really together for me. So I have been doing – while I’ve been doing research for over, well if you – with my PhD because that was my second career over 15 years if you count that but with Indigenous communities for about 10 years.

So what made me decide to be involved in research with patient partners is that I wanted to do research with Indigenous communities and you don’t do research without complete full participation and partnership with your communities, so there’s – that is the way you do research with then, you develop the research questions together, you identify the priority, problems that they want to focus on and then develop the questions and what the evaluation framework will look like, what is important to the community to understand, so it was just they go together. So there’s – if you want to work with Indigenous people you do it in full partnership, so really that’s the reason.

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