Bloomberg Nursing is delighted to share that several of our graduate students have received University of Toronto COVID-19 Student Engagement Awards. These awards provide funding to University of Toronto students to work collaboratively on projects that contribute to building and fostering a global community during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Danielle Patricia Gray, Nma Jerry-Egemba, and Kinza Malik, — students enrolled in the Bloomberg Nursing Master of Nursing Health Systems Leadership and Administration program — received funding to support their project “COVID-19 Long-Term Care Redeployment Policy”.
Approximately 62-82 percent of Canadian coronavirus-related deaths occur in residents of nursing homes, long-term care, and supportive living facilities. Through their experiences working as frontline nurses, Jerry-Egemba, Gray, and Malik have witnessed the failure of Ontario’s redeployment policy to mitigate the COVID-19 outbreak in these long-term care facilities.
Throughout the project, the students will apply their clinical expertise and emerging policy and leadership skills to communicate the unique insights and knowledge of frontline nurses, in order to stimulate policy-level discussion among nurses, and raise awareness about policy implementation challenges and unintended consequences. The project findings will present alternative representations of the problems plaguing Ontario’s long-term care system, in order to achieve better outcomes for highly vulnerable residents of long-term care.
Jerry-Egemba, Gray, and Malik will work with Bloomberg Nursing Assistant Professor Dr. Quinn Grundy to build capacity to analyze, compare, and critique policy and contribute to knowledge translation among academia, healthcare, and policymaking
Danielle Just and Caroline Variath — Bloomberg Nursing PhD students — received funding to support their project “A review of long-term care policy changes implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic: a Canadian analysis”.
Just and Variath will explore the impact of COVID-19 on provincial policy changes in LTC, link and compare provincial policy changes during the COVID-19 pandemic to global experiences and recommendations, and provide recommendations for further policy changes in LTC in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Just and Variath aim to use their findings to build capacity within the LTC system to continue the fight against COVID-19, and better prepare Canadian LTC homes for future pandemics or outbreaks of communicable diseases
Danielle Just is a 2nd-year PhD student under the supervision of Dr. Lisa Cranley
Caroline Variath is a 2nd-year PhD student under the supervision of Dr. Elizabeth Peter.