Elliott has a well-established background as a nurse educator whose research scholarship is focused on trauma-informed care and education.
Rachel Elliott has spent much of her career thinking about how to prepare the next generation of nurses. As a passionate and driven nurse educator, she is deeply committed to helping students learn how to be a good nurse, but also how to see themselves as change agents within the healthcare system.
“As an educator I love to help mentor students, and walk alongside them. I work hard to create innovative learning experiences so that they see themselves belonging in the profession and at the tables where the future of healthcare is being shaped,” says Elliott.
Elliott joined Bloomberg Nursing this summer as an Assistant Professor – teaching stream, with previous teaching experience at the college level and more recently at the University of Windsor. When she learned of the opportunity to join U of T’s Bloomberg Nursing, she knew she couldn’t turn it down.
Embedding trauma-informed care into education
“It feels so special to join a community with such a high level of expertise, and a faculty that values and resources teaching,” says Elliott. “I see teaching as scholarship and transformative work, and I feel like I can contribute here.”
Elliott’s scholarship has focused on embedding trauma-informed care into undergraduate nursing education. Her interest in this area emerged, she says, during her clinical experiences and Master’s research, when she worked as a critical care nurse and on-call for sexual assault and domestic violence in the emergency department. Through this clinical experience, she recognized a gap in training to help women who were experiencing this form of violence, and she wanted to help them feel safe and trauma-informed.
During her Master’s degree, Elliott worked on a one-on-one intervention with women after leaving a violent relationship. Her research shaped how she wanted to apply her learning into her clinical practice, knowing that for many women, a terrible experience in healthcare can shape their future help-seeking.
As an educator, Elliott has thought deeply about why concepts and content related to trauma are not strategically embedded into the undergraduate curriculum. Nurses, she says, need to have those skills because trauma is so prevalent in the population.
“Two-thirds of Canadians will experience a traumatic event in their lifetime. How we educate nurses to care for our community is therefore so important,” says Elliott.
Helping students feel seen
In the classroom, she wants students to feel seen. She provides a relational approach to teaching, focusing on being approachable and accessible for students so they feel safe coming to office hours and asking questions. She also wants them to feel like they belong to the nursing profession, right from the start of their academic journey.
“I really encourage students to have a voice. Showing up is not enough; I want them to be engaged and share their opinions because that is nursing – that is what will help them think critically and make clinical judgments to care for patients,” says Elliott.
With the start of the fall term around the corner, Elliott is looking forward to meeting students in the BScN program and helping them see all of the possibilities available within nursing.
“Sometimes students don’t know what they want to do yet, or have preconceived notions about nursing,” says Elliott. “I hope I can help them think differently about what is possible.”