Nova Scotia Nurses Award

My path to nursing has been indirect and continues to evolve, but I have no doubt that nursing will be a life-long career. Before nursing, I earned degrees in Philosophy and Psychology and worked as a Research Assistant in Bioethics, an Account Coordinator in IT, and as an Editorial Assistant in Social Psychology. But none of these combined my love of people, my interest in research, and my passion for social issues. I moved to London, Ontario in 2007, paused to reflect on the strengths I’d developed and my future career goals, and realized nursing was an ideal fit for me. I enrolled in Western University’s compressed time-frame Bachelor of Science in Nursing and graduated in 2010. Since then I have worked in a rural hospital in Nova Scotia providing emergency, ambulatory, outpatient, inpatient and palliative care to persons across the life span.

The breadth of rural practice helped me to find my strengths in nursing and reinforced my interest in working with marginalized groups, and women, youth and those with mental illness in particular.  I enrolled in the Masters’ of Nursing program at Dalhousie in 2012 and have refined my interests with guidance from faculty. I was initially focused on parents and adolescents facing mental health issues in Nova Scotia and am increasingly interested in understanding how the nurse practitioner role might intersect with these populations. Through my education I aim to practice as a primary care NP caring for adolescents experiencing mental illness.