Promoting Nursing Research in a Hospital: the Early Challenges
Celeste was the first Canadian hospital-based Director of Nursing Research, due to the vision of Evelyn Malowney, the Director of Nursing at the Montreal Children’s. At that time, 1978, Celeste was part of only 3% of nurses in Canada with doctoral preparation. As such, most staff at the MCH did not know what to make of her, what she might do.
Based on her doctoral dissertation work with young children using peer models as teachers, she wrote a proposal in which children modeled coping behaviours when coming for surgery. She submitted this proposal to the Research Institute at the MCH and it was refused. Happily, a member of the Scientific Review Committee of the Research Institute, Mike Kramer, a brilliant researcher who later became director of the Child and Youth Health and Development Institute at CIHR, called her and asked to meet. He told her that the proposal was solid, that the MCH research committee only funded basic science at that time, and that I should submit it to NHRDP which funded behavioural and epidemiological research. Much to her surprise, it was funded by NHRDP!
But the story was not over. She then had to meet with the chief of surgery and orthopedics, the general surgery and ENT surgeons quickly having welcomed it. At that meeting the chief of surgery shook his head and said “They’ll fund anything these days” and the chief of orthopedics asked who was going to supervise her. The study did eventually get started and went well with a publication out of it.
Perhaps more importantly there was a major shift by the physicians and surgeons from being patronizing to realizing that she could compete for funding better than many of them. With this realization, came respect and invitations to participate in more research activities in the hospital. The Nursing Research Committee was formed with Judith Collinge and Celeste as co-chairs.
Celeste gradually spent more time at McGill and was liason between the School of Nursing and the MCH in terms of getting both scientific and ethical approval for the Master’s clinical studies which were qualitative with small samples. No one on the committees at the MCH knew anything about these types of studies and either refused them outright or took so long to approve that the academic year was almost over. Celeste found a friend and champion in the Associate Dean of Medicine for Research, Bitten Stripp ( a woman!) who agreed to come to a meeting of the MCH Research Committee to argue that approval of these studies at the McGill School of Nursing should constitute scientific merit.
For newly graduating nurses from all the programs at the Ingram School of Nursing, it may seem so obvious that nursing be a part of research in hospitals, but this local history provides a glimpse of the numerous hurdles that had to be jumped over, requiring strategies as well as strength.