Marilyn is a Co-Investigator on the Partnership Grant and oversaw the Partnership Development Grant's pilot story-sharing component at Holland Bloorview. A small filmmaking team spent two weeks in an inpatient unit, capturing the work and life stories of nurses and their patients. Our Project Administrator Anna Adjemian spoke with Marilyn about her involvement in the project and her passion for SBNH.
Anna Adjemian: Please give us a short background and summary of who you are and what you do professionally.
Marilyn Ballantyne: I began in Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) and maternal and child health nursing. I have been a pediatric Nurse Practitioner for 30 years, with a specialty in early childhood development in the NICU, Neonatal Follow-up and Complex Care. I received my PhD in health services and did postdoctoral work in both hospital-based and community-based health services, working with high risk infants and families. For the last six years I’ve been at Holland Bloorview as Chief Nurse Executive, responsible for the academic and strategic leadership of nursing practice, education, and research and running a research program focused on improving health services and transitions for NICU families as they move from hospital to community. This allows me to pursue my dual interests in continuously advancing health care services and innovation through research.
I have an incredible passion for strength-oriented approaches to care that are child- and family-centred. It is a complicated journey to start your family story with something different and more challenging than what you expected for your baby. At Holland Bloorview we see a lot of children who have started their journey that way –many are born preterm, or have developmental difficulties/disabilities. I’ve had the benefit in my career of the taking the journey or trajectory with families – from birth through childhood – looking at what can make systems and care better for children and families.
Why did you get involved with this project?
I’ve been involved from the very beginning. When I came to Holland Bloorview in 2014, right away I met with a point-of-care nurse who had connected with Dr. Laurie Gottlieb shortly after she published her book Strengths-Based Nursing Care. This nurse had contacted Laurie to discuss how to embed the values and concepts in the book into nursing care, and took the initiative to put together book clubs and Strengths-Based conversations with her colleagues, using the values of SBNH to discuss clinical scenarios and family goal planning. I saw immediately that children’s rehab was a perfect place to integrate SBNH. Families are often recovering and healing from complex experiences - wouldn’t it be wonderful to provide nursing care from the lens of what’s working well for families rather than what is not working? The nurses were already trying to do this, and SBNH gave the words, the framework, and the confidence to validate what [nurses] were already thinking and support them in working in collaborative partnerships with families.
I had worked with Pam Hubley (Chief International Nursing, VP Education, SickKids Toronto) at SickKids for many years, and we had a well-established partnership and respect for each other. Pam was working on integrating SBNH at SickKids. We shared an understanding that this philosophy is a perfect fit in paediatrics and met regularly to come up with ideas collectively. When the work of the Partnership Development Grant began, Holland Bloorview was a wonderful place to start the pilot project’s story-sharing component as families often spend several weeks on the inpatient units undergoing rehabilitation. We could gather really rich stories that would be effective in the leadership training program.
What does SBNH mean to you?
SBNH is about improving lives; navigating people through expected and unexpected healthcare events using a holistic approach to care that helps them to heal and recover in a meaningful way. The values are the core. They keep you grounded, staying focused on curiosity, learning, creating, collaborating, and compassion; looking at the whole picture and being a partner in health, healing and wellness for families. I love being able to create that passion in those who are directly involved in care.
What does this project mean to you, and/or what do you hope to see come out of your work on this project?
If teams are healthy, kids and families get great care. This project looks at what we can use to create and enable, encourage, recognize, and support workplaces that are healthy for everybody. Through the pilot project and especially the story-sharing component I deepened my understanding of differentiating between what we need to pay attention to in the nurses’ environment in a Strengths-Based way, and how we then think about a whole organization from a Strengths-Based perspective. One of the things that’s wonderful about my role as Chief Nurse is being able to influence and support how people learn – the way they operate, lead, provide care – and how people reflect on their experiences. That gets us to the next level using strengths.
Our involvement in the pilot had unintended, amazing consequences. Kitra (Kitra Cahana, filmmaker) captured amazing moments. She made visible what’s typically invisible to others: capturing relationships and how nurses use them to navigate care in the most beautiful way. Hospitals are efficiency-oriented, and it was so meaningful and touching to the nurses to see the film of their own work – looking at themselves and reflecting not on their speed and efficiency, but the depth of their relationships. I think those “soft skills” are actually the hard skills! The human side, not the technical side of care. Seeing their work reflected back to them [in the short films], those nurses saw that their work is so valuable , and that their relationship skills are the most important thing. It was deeply meaningful in terms of their value as nurses and their ability to work to their fullest.