麻豆传媒AV

A registered nurse who makes her home in North Battleford and teaches at the University of Saskatchewan is about to undertake a research project that will look at why nurse managers weep over their work.

Sonia Udod has won a research award from the Saskatchewan Health Research Foundation, the lead agency for the provincial government's Health Research Strategy, for a study on the role stressors and coping experiences of nurse managers in Saskatchewan and Alberta hospitals.

The physical and mental well-being of nurse managers is a crucial part of positive health care outcomes, says Udod, and she is passionate about the research she is about to undertake. Never, she says, will she forget the nurse manager who, upon being asked what her job was like, answered simply - with tears.

Udod holds a master's degree in nursing and a doctorate in nursing administration and is an assistant professor at the University of Saskatchewan College of Nursing. She has combined expertise in nursing leadership and health services research and has been with the U of S since 2006.

In her field of nursing, Udod believes she has found her best strength in her work as a researcher.

"I love what I do," she says.

She says it has always been apparent to her that people who need help and support or are marginalized are those who need advocates, and through research she can make a difference. Having amassed significant experience investigating nurses' work life and other health care related issues already, she believes there are even more opportunities for research in her future.

"I have more work to do - that I need to do," says Udod.

Her latest research project, building on a pilot study she did five years ago, aims to understand the stress acute care nurse managers are under in order to design support systems that lead to more positive staff experiences in the workplace and to more positive patient experiences.

There was a time when everyone wanted to be a head nurse, says Udod. But that's not the case anymore. Nurse managers in Saskatchewan today face high stress and heavy workloads. No longer is a manager responsible for one unit; it's more likely they are managing more than one, with 100 staff or more to take charge over. Feeling overburdened can contribute to more leaves of absence, more overtime and more illness, and it also influences nurse manager retention, she says.

This is critical at a time when nurses are in short supply and fewer nurses want to step in to the unit manager role, says Udod, who adds there are unit manager positions in Saskatchewan that have had to be filled by non-nurses.

To undertake her research, Udod, as principal investigator, will be working with co-investigators Dr. Greta Cummings of the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Alberta and Dr. Dean Care of the Faculty of Health Studies at Brandon University. They will be working with a $119,433 establishment grant from the Saskatchewan Research Foundation, which has also honoured Udod with a top researcher in socio-health award.

The research will be conducted throughout rural and urban acute care facilities in the Saskatoon Health Region, Prairie North Health Region (Udod's home region) and in the Edmonton Zone of Alberta Health Services. Data will be collected from about 20 nurse managers in each area through individual and focus group interviews.

The interviews will take about one hour each, says Udod. She points out, however, that even that extra hour of time is difficult for some nurse managers to fit into their busy days. As researchers, they plan to be sensitive to the nurse managers's time, making sure their subjects know their work is valued, she says.

The research project will take a total of three years and is just in the stages of getting research ethics committee approvals, which ensures research projects or protocols adhere to certain standards, so they can get started, says Udod. For herself, it will mean six hours a week work on the research project, in addition to her regular full time teaching schedule. She will be responsible for the overall conduct and integrity of the study, training and supervising research assistants, data collection, analysis and knowledge translation activities.

Cummings and Care will be contributing two hours per week. Both are experienced, award-winning researchers Udod is excited to have on the team.

Udod is also currently a co-investigator in a Canadian Institutes of Health Research grant investigating the capacity of internationally educated nurses to integrate into the Canadian nursing workforce. She has also been involved in a study focusing on the redesign of care delivery within the Saskatoon Health Region.

Her research experience has extended into competencies of nurse managers, emotional intelligence of chief executive officers, employee empowerment and its implications for leadership, the quality of work life for oncology nurses in outpatient clinics and the Releasing Time to Care initiative (which has now evolved into the Lean initiative.)

She has also done work in distance education of remote located students and well as faculty support needs in distributed learning.

Over the next several years her research plan is to gather together a team, including Care and Cummings plus researchers from the College of Nursing at the U of S, to investigate nurses' work environments with an aim to improve the quality of work life of nurses in Saskatchewan and beyond.

"I believe nurses and nurse managers are doing their very best, and want to do their very best, but sometimes the complexity or acuity of the jobs makes it hard, which leads to patient and family complaints and makes everybody really anxious," says Udod. "And when people are anxious, mistakes are made.

As a teacher, Udod says she tells her students what they are likely to find in their workplaces. She feels it's important to be realistic about what work will be like in a hospital.

She believes in teaching nursing students "to have autonomy, to be reflective, to know they have a voice and can advocate for themselves and their patients."

In reality, however, the institutions where they find work may not promote those ideas, and nurses and nurse managers can find themselves caring not only for their patients but for the institution itself, she says. It's a problematic situation for which she sees no easy answer.

However, she hopes her research will help develop resolutions to these kinds of issues.

Udod is a committed teacher and researcher, but she is also a wife and community member, active in her Ukrainian culture and in her faith. She says there have been times when things have "fallen into her lap," indicating to her that those are the things her God wants her to do.

Udod is married to Fr. Taras Udod, who serves the North Battleford Parish district of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada. They first met through friends at a wedding in Hafford and were married in Sonia's hometown church, the Nativity of St. Mary Ukrainian Orthodox Church, at Gronlid in 1995. They have lived in Manitoba and in New York, where Sonia received her master's degree in nursing, and in 1999, Fr. Taras moved to North Battleford. Until Sonia also moved to North Battleford in 2006, they maintained a long distance marriage while she continued her career in Ontario and Manitoba.

Now that she works at the University of Saskatchewan, the Udods maintain a condo in Saskatoon, and Sonia says she works long days in order to come home to North Battleford for three-day weekends as often as possible. She admits she usually brings work home with her.

Through the university, she teaches nursing leadership and management to fourth year undergrads, and is about to teach a televised course on health and wellness in a local and global context to second year students to help them understand how health, illness and disease are linked globally and to engage them in the understanding that what's happening here is impacted by the outside world.

This course is directed to students of the La Ronge and Ile-a-la-Cross campuses of the U of S. In past research projects involving aboriginal populations, Udod has found the importance with which she holds her own culture has helped her to be sensitive to the cultures of others, and she hopes to learn from her students in the upcoming course as well as pass on her knowledge.