Meet our Consultants:
Catherine Oliver (image: left), RN, BA, MSc(A), retired Nursing Practice Consultant, Department of Nursing, McGill University Health Centre; faculty lecturer, McGill University School of Nursing; and current Mentorship Consultant for the Partnership Grant.
Michele Durrant (image: right), BScN, MSc, Training and Learning Consultant for the Partnership Grant and Professor, School of Nursing, Seneca College.
Catherine and Michele co-developed the mentorship component of the Strengths-Based Nursing and Healthcare Leadership (SBNH-L) Program, which provides six months of mentorship to SBNH-L Program participants. They also co-developed and co-deliver the Mentor Community of Practice, which provides ongoing support, training, and resources to SBNH-L mentors. Michele has been involved in this project since the 2017 pilot program; and as Training and Learning Consultant, she has been an integral member of the Training Committee, working alongside the program faculty to design and refine their modules. Catherine began as a collaborator on the grant, representing the MUHC. After her retirement, she continued on in her new capacity as Mentorship Consultant.
Anna Adjemian: Could you please give us a short background/summary of who you are and what you do professionally?
Catherine Oliver: I’m recently retired from the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC), where I worked for over 30 years as bedside nurse, clinical educator, nurse manager and nursing practice consultant. I enjoy learning and growing and the MUHC gave me the opportunity to do that: I was the Nurse Manager of the Palliative Care units at the Royal Victoria Hospital and the Montreal General Hospital for a number of years. I then moved into positions where I worked transversally across the 5 sites of the MUHC. I was responsible for continuing nursing education, where I developed our first MUHC orientation program and then created onboarding programs for new nurses which included mentorship. I pioneered the department’s e-learning program. Latterly, my focus moved away from education towards quality of care: I worked with some exceptional teams to develop and implement a variety of programs across all the sites of the MUHC – among others these included programs that improved patient and family care at the end-of-life; the care of the elderly; that renewed the MUHC’s family visiting policy. I developed a nurse consultant position for the Medical Aid in Dying program, and with Infection Control practitioners reduced the incidence of VRE (vancomycin-resistant enterococci). I enjoyed the variety of the projects I worked on and enjoyed working with the different, often interprofessional, teams I led.
I came to nursing via liberal arts. I have an honours BA in History from the University of Toronto. I then completed a Masters of Nursing at McGill University. I remember learning about the McGill Model of Nursing – which was the precursor to SBNH – and thinking: this fits with my values and what I want to do – the focus on patient and family, on health rather than illness, on identifying and developing strengths, and the idea that health resides within the individual. These values have guided me in whatever position I’ve taken on.
Michele Durrant: I’ve worked for over 30 years as an educator, with both a clinical and corporate focus at SickKids Hospital. More recently, I moved to Seneca College as a professor in the School of Nursing, and joined this project as Training and Learning Consultant. Before working at SickKids, I was a pediatric nurse in a community hospital, and then I moved to SickKids, starting in the neonatal intensive care unit. Then I moved to pediatric intensive care for a number of years before becoming an educator. My love has been working with children.
Over the years, the educator role evolved into a broader consultation role within clinical programs, and then my role had an added corporate element. I designed programming and taught content for both orientation and continuing education. I then transitioned from working only with nurses to working with nurses and interprofessional clinicians. The last program I was involved with was the Teaching Scholars program, which targeted physicians, as well as nurses, social workers, psychologists, respiratory therapists – whoever wanted to take part in advancing their teaching portfolio and scholarship. That was truly an interprofessional program, and significant for SickKids. It was a large endeavor, and I partnered with a physician colleague, Dr Mark Feldman, Director of Community Paediatrics and Continuing Education, in leading this program. The other significant project I was involved in and very proud of was a diversity initiative I co-led with Bonnie Fleming-Carroll [an SBNH-L Program faculty member and mentor], Associate Chief, Nursing and Interprofessional Education. It was a hospital-wide endeavour that lasted for six years. We developed education programming that shifted mindset and were able to incorporate diversity into the strategic plan. We mapped our progress through a series of annual reports that we created. These were really innovations, ideas to move forward and run with. It was quite the journey.
Why did you get involved with this project?
MD: I was involved in the pilot program, on the planning committee that guided the Strengths-Based Nursing Leadership Management Program, and I was also a faculty member. I took the lead with Laurie to work on the evaluation, and we were very successful. Pam Hubley [co-investigator on the Partnership Grant], Laurie [Gottlieb] and I recently published a paper on the pilot program and the results. We’re really proud of that work. When I left SickKids, I met with Pam [Hubley, co-investigator of the Partnership Grant] and told her that I wanted to continue my work on this project in the next iteration, but I didn’t know how it would happen for me. She suggested that I talk to Laurie, which I did. She interviewed me and this segued into the role I’m in now.
I had been a part of the SBNH book club [at SickKids] which Pam had organized as VP of Education. We read Laurie’s book and talked about what it meant; what this could be. The book is such a rich description of reflective practice, and has all kinds of tools. I thought it was absolutely amazing work and I wanted to use it in my work as an educator. I had an opportunity to work with Laurie when I was on the planning committee for a symposium, and she was one of the presenters. I was curious, so I’d always ask her questions about my ideas that I was moving forward. I developed an education program focused on communication, and I wanted to re-design it to be strengths-focused. Laurie spent quite a bit of time with me to make this happen. She gave me some ideas around that work and helped me hone some of the beginning work of SBNH at SickKids. I just keep reading that book.
CO: I remember Julie Frechette [a collaborator on the Partnership Grant] telling me, “Michele knows that book better than anybody.”
MD: I’ve read it three full times, but I still go back to it. I am still learning from Laurie.
CO: One of my colleagues asked if I would be interested in participating in a book Laurie was writing on strengths. I said certainly, because this was something that I valued and tried to incorporate in my practice. Each contributor was asked to come to the interview with a clinical example that illustrated their working with strengths and share it with Laurie. I had just moved from being nurse manager of palliative care units at the Royal Victoria and Montreal General Hospital, where I had merged the two units – it was very intense for patients and families, staff, and me. I remember saying to Laurie “I think I used a Strengths-Based focus in my position as a nurse manager.” Laurie said, “Tell me more.” I had an idea but it wasn’t well articulated – I was using the approach intuitively. Now we have the terminology of collaborative practice, developing a growth mindset, the uniqueness of staff, developing a unique interaction with patients… This [SBNH] vocabulary is so useful. It helps us define what we are doing and allows us to be more intentional in developing our leadership and practice. I don’t think we ever got to the clinical example I had brought to share. The book came out and later the partnership grant began. At the same time there was a lot of work being done to develop SBNH within the McGill community. I was part of the SBNH Advisory Committee led by Laurie [an initiative of the McGill Nursing Collaborative]. [At the time], it included nurse leaders from CIUSS de Centre Ouest, McGill, and the MUHC, and its goal is to promote SBNH across our network.
When the MUHC came onto the partnership grant, I became a collaborator. I loved the SBNH-L approach and believed very much in the idea of developing leaders as a way of influencing workplace culture. In 2020, I retired. I remember receiving the email telling me that I could no longer continue on the grant as I was no longer working at the MUHC and thinking – I don’t want to stop being a part of this! I wrote Laurie an email saying that I would like to explore the possibility of continuing to be part of the training program. I mentioned some ideas; I had developed a mentorship program at the MUHC, and I’d done a lot of work with students on developing projects like the program’s capstone. Laurie got back to me within 24 hours. Julie Frechette had just left; she was Michele’s partner in developing the mentorship component.
MD: You took over where she left off.
CO: It was good timing. I was thrilled, although I have to say initially a bit intimidated by it all.
MD: There wasn't a road map!
CO: We talk about SBNH-L being a journey, and I felt I was further back on the journey than everyone else. I was still learning the language. I understood SBNH, however I couldn’t speak yet. Michele was fluent.
MD: Hardly!
CO: It’s worked itself out. And perhaps that sense of being less advanced in SBNH was helpful in thinking about developing strategies to help those mentors less familiar with the philosophy.
Explain a bit about your partnership, your work together on this project.
MD: Catherine and I are like-minded in how we think about the mentorship component of the [SBNH-L] Program: it’s not the training program and mentorship, it’s one program with two components. So, then the question was, how do we build this out? We needed to have mentors who were engaged in the process, and that needed to be further developed. They needed an orientation, and then we needed to continually engage them. We planned together and collaborated to look at where we were and where we needed to go. All the ideas were on paper, but we needed to operationalize them. We had the idea for the [mentor] Community of Practice, and we subsequently put some structure around it.
CO: I came on board [as mentorship consultant] in January 2021. Over the spring and summer of 2021, we worked hard – developing the orientation program, the Community of Practice and, with [online course designer] Natalie Oldfield’s expertise, the Mentorship Portal [on McGill MyCourses]. We used the supporting documents which had already been established and also developed the Field Guide for Mentors, with a focus on story-sharing. Some of the mentors had been part of the pilot and were familiar with SBNH, and others were not. We had to think about how we would bring this diverse group up to speed quickly, so they would have the tools and understanding they needed to support their mentees to move SBNH-L values and foundations from concepts into their practice. The mentors are an extremely capable and committed group – they’re very impressive. The Community of Practice has, I hope, helped them further develop their skills, answer their questions, and develop their thinking. It’s a place where they have shared and learned both from each other and from Laurie. The participants have found the support of their mentors so important in their learning and integration of SBNH-L.
MD: I see it as four innovations that we’re working to operationalize. First, there’s the document, Strengths-Based Nursing and Healthcare Leadership: Value-Driven Capacities for Leaders (Hubley, Gottlieb, and Durrant, 2021) about SBNH Leadership which frames the entire program and guided the Training Committee program developers (Pam Hubley, Laurie Gottlieb, Christina Clausen, and myself). Then there is the Field Guide for Mentors, a practical resource that we developed to frame mentorship in relation to the SBNH-L Value-Driven Capacities for Leaders. There is the Facilitative Engagement Approach, a conversational strategy which we brought to life in the orientation program with a fishbowl exercise and case studies. It’s about reflective practice and action planning. We developed related pocket cards that the mentors could use to practice. We really tried to make each piece very practical, to be easily integrated into people’s practice. Story-sharing is the final innovation, and it is integrated into the Facilitative Engagement Approach, but could be used as a stand-alone process as well. We have introduced this in a number of ways within the Community of Practice. We wanted to make it move from theory to practice; to make it practical and user-friendly so people can actually use it and teach others.
CO: The mentors needed tools they could use. Prior to the orientation day, we developed a number of reflection exercises which we then built upon in the Orientation session to help them solidify their understanding of SBNH values and foundations. We introduced the Facilitative Engagement approach initially by having the mentors watch us use the approach, and they then used case scenarios to practice using it themselves.
MD: Laurie describes Story-Sharing as being integral to the SBNH-L Program. This innovation involves the telling and then the sharing of stories, deepening of learning that informs new embodied leadership actions. Story-Sharing is a practical and user-friendly strategy integrated into the program that acknowledges the leader’s context and creates meaningful learning that allows for application in the leader’s practice.
CO: As we’ve moved from cohort 1 to cohort 2, we’ve built on the Story-Sharing work that Laurie and Michele developed and introduced it more intentionally in the Community of Practice sessions. Michele has deep roots in the program and has worked a lot with Laurie on developing Story-Sharing. I’m very respectful of that, and so impressed by the work that they have done. Michele did exceptional work developing the active learning strategies that made on-line training sessions work. It’s been fun to work with Michele. I’ve learned a lot from her, and we’re very supportive of one another.
MD: We’re committed to the same cause.
What does SBNH/SBNH-L mean to you?
MD: It’s a way of thinking and a way of doing. It helps us re-think and re-imagine possibilities. It’s value-driven, it’s a philosophy, an approach. It guides us.
CO: I think for nurses it’s so important that we are able to describe what we do. SBNH/SBNH-L gives us a vocabulary and a compelling voice. During the pandemic, I’ve been so impressed by the commitment of the partners, mentors, and mentees to continue this work. SBNH/SBNH-L keeps us centred on what is important in healthcare, and what is important in nursing and interprofessional care. COVID has been so draining and SBNH-L has re-energized the leaders who participated in the program.
MD: It’s about compassionate care. It brings us back to the basics of what matters. Laurie talks about it as humanizing care and the care environment.
CO: I agree with Michele – it is about humanizing care. To give an example or to tell a story, my husband was in hospital last spring, and among his nurses, there were some who nursed the (cardiac) monitor, and then there were other nurses who nursed the person (and me) – while they were hanging the IV, while they were checking his leads and his lines. He’d become very ill very quickly and we were trying to develop meaning, to understand what was going on. Some nurses were able to help us with that and their care made all the difference at a time when we felt most vulnerable. I remember saying to my husband, “This is an SBNH approach”.
What does this project mean to you/what do you hope to see come out of your work on this project?
MD: I hope this becomes a national movement, and that this program is made available to all leaders across Canada.
CO: I agree. I hope that it has impact on front-line caregivers, and on their care. That it continues to grow in greater depth both at the participating hospitals and nationally.
MD: Participants [in the SBNH-L Program] are saying that it is helpful to re-energize them and their environments, and that it is having an impact on their teams. It’s not the future, it’s happening now. It’s about core values. That’s why it resonates with so many people.
CO: Just before I retired my boss Alain Biron (co-investigator of the Partnership Grant and current MUHC Director of Nursing) said to me “After all these years, what pearl do you want to leave us with?” My answer was that I thought we needed to focus on the relational aspects of care, and that SBNH would help us to do that. It would recenter us. Many hospitals have had a rocky time answering to multiple government mandates and demands, and dealing with the stresses of COVID. Laurie’s work brings us back to our core values and why we stay on in spite of today’s challenges.