Health care restructuring, COVID redeployment inspire thesis for nursing master’s student
Not long after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in nursing in 2017, Charlene Braun started her first leadership role, as a nurse educator at Grace Hospital. At that time the Manitoba health system was in a period of restructuring and consolidation, which inspired her to return to UM and pursue a master’s degree.
“It was a time of drastic change, and a lot of nurses were experiencing upheaval in their lives. It made me think of what we could do from a leadership perspective to help with transitions like that,” she said.
Currently, Braun – who also has a bachelor’s degree in genetics from UM – is in the administrative stream of the master of nursing program at the College of Nursing. She also works in a nurse administrative role where she leads clinical discussions to bridge expertise between clinicians and supply chain decision-making with Shared Health.
Her master’s thesis research is on understanding nurses’ experiences through redeployment during the COVID-19 pandemic, something she had direct experience with herself.
We spoke to Braun about her research.
How did the COVID-19 pandemic affect your research focus in your master of nursing program?
I entered in 2019 with the idea of leadership in terms of change management. In pursuing that, my advisor pointed me to a theory called “structural empowerment.” The idea is that it’s not the innate characteristics of the person, but rather the environment that impacts how happy and satisfied people are at their jobs. So, things like access to resources, information, support and opportunity – these are actually what drive that retention and satisfaction.
During the pandemic, I was redeployed as a nurse to the intensive care unit from my educator role at the time. I suddenly found myself in the ICU. I’d been a perioperative nurse my whole career, so it was quite a shift. I also went from a Monday to Friday eight-hour day job to working 12-hour night shifts. To help myself adjust to this new situation, I found myself using the structural empowerment theory to analyze my experience and make sense of how it was impacting me.
For instance, there was some disparity between myself and nurses that were redeployed earlier in the pandemic, such as not having access to the orientation and training program that were previously offered. There was also an insinuation from management that I should be approaching redeployment from a place of optimism, and that this was a good thing for me professionally. I felt this denied me the ability to be open about my feelings regarding this change and led to a sense of isolation.
Under the weight of these experiences – and many more – I began to analyze the insufficiency and inequality I felt in these areas over the duration of my redeployment. This truly helped me have a deeper understanding of my experience and instead of spiraling under the weight of it, I realized structural empowerment was an excellent framework and I used it to draft questions to help understand other nurses’ experiences of redeployment during the pandemic.
What have you discovered in your research?
I’ve interviewed 10 participants who are nurses that were redeployed to unfamiliar clinical settings during the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s been really wonderful hearing everyone’s experiences. It’s really lending well to my ultimate goal, which is to understand how to have better nurse satisfaction and retention. It’s great to see the diversity of experiences that people have gone through, both positive and negative, that we can take forward into the future.
There was a lot of turmoil during the pandemic. People did the best they could with what they had, but there will probably be another pandemic down the road. So, I think it’s important that we learn from experience to help leaders in the future make redeployment as positive of an experience as possible for nurses.
What’s next for you?
I’ve always been interested in leadership and, after I finish my master’s, I see myself continuing on that path. I definitely want to pursue leadership wherever that may take me, whether that is supply chain or elsewhere. I also hope to publish a paper on this research, because I believe it can provide valuable information for leaders moving forward, should another pandemic hit in the coming years.