Aurora College Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) students and faculty celebrated and shared their knowledge at the annual Northern Nursing Research Day, held on November 30. The School of Health and Human Services Research Day is an opportunity to showcase and honour scholarship and academic work of students, faculty and invited scholars, and to celebrate student success.
This year, the event was hosted by Aurora College and Hotıì ts’eeda. A total of 23 posters were featured – 19 literature review researches from fourth-year BSN students and four research projects led by the faculty.
Guest speakers shared information about cultural safety and safe nursing practice, as well as how to implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in health research and services in the North.
The theme of this year’s Research Day was “Clinical Safety in our Northern Context” and was divided into three broad areas: Moving Towards Health Equity; Supporting Nursing Education & Workforce; and Clinical Innovations for Nursing Practice. The topics chosen for the research posters and the unique approaches taken by the students underscore the importance of developing and applying research that is for the North, by the North and with the North, to improve the quality of care and to prioritize decolonizing approaches to advance nursing knowledge.
Three awards were presented to students at the event:
Creativity Award – Angela Roy for Managed Alcohol Programs: MAP-ping Out the NWT’s Response to Alcohol Use Disorders in Homeless Populations;
Scientific Rigour Award – Brook Dwyer for Colorectal Cancer in Indigenous Peoples: A Call to Action; and
People’s Choice Award – Obiageri Zita Korie for Why Are Nurses Leaving: Could Stanton Become a Magnet Hospital?
The research projects are the culmination of the fourth-year students’ Nursing Research course. The intent of the course is to increase understanding of nursing scholarship and enhance the students’ ability to comprehend, critique and utilize nursing research. To create the final product, students developed a research question, search and collected literature and evidence, appraised the evidence, organized their findings, and then created recommendations for the clinical, research, education, and/or policy level, applicable to a northern context.
Students were also invited by Hotıì ts’eeda to display their research posters again for the Dene Nation during their leadership meetings on December 14.
