Giving a real-world education
Veteran gives students a taste of what life is like as a modern-day nurse
Innovation is behind associate professor’s lessons to best fit the students in today’s classrooms.
Sue Coffey’s nursing students got a shock recently when, in the midst of a session on treating addiction issues, a real-time emergency unfolded in the hall. “We need help here,” screamed a woman from the classroom door. The students ran out into the hall to discover a person slumped against the wall and with syringes and drug paraphernalia nearby.
The person was actually a manikin, and the emergency was staged. But the third-year collaborative nursing students at University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) — Durham College got a taste of the adrenaline-pumping, highstakes decisions that nurses make when faced with a patient experiencing an overdose. They had to figure out what was going on, manage the patient’s safety as well as their own, and then work through as a team how to treat the patient, both therapeutically and as a human being.
The simulation is the brain child of Sue Coffey, associate professor in UOIT’s nursing program and winner of this year’s Toronto Star Nightingale Award. “Sue thinks in the now, but also looks to the future,” says Charles Anyinam, an assistant professor at Nipissing University in North Bay, Ont., who nominated Coffey and was part of an interprofessional team of educators that helped develop the simulation. “She is always pushing the envelope in terms of what we can do to make sure our nurses are prepared to meet the demands of patient populations in Ontario.”
Given the growing opioid crisis, Coffey believed nursing students needed hands-on experience with handling an overdose and administering naloxone if needed. “Overdoses are extremely serious, but they don’t happen very often,” she says. “As a nurse, the first time you deal with it shouldn’t be with a real person.”
The simulation gives students a chance to develop their skills so they can perform more confidently in a crisis. A debrief session encourages them to ask questions such as: How did that go? How did it feel? If it happened again, what would I do differently? And, since nurses “work to save lives and promote health, but also to preserve dignity, that’s part of the debriefing as well,” Coffey says.
As a 30-year veteran of nursing — the first 13 in a hospital and the last17 in nursing education, Coffey knows what she’s talking about. “She has influenced the focus of nursing education far beyond the local arena,” Anyinam says. “Sue is nothing short of exceptional. Over the past decade, she has been recognized at the faculty, university, provincial and national level for her commitment, capacity for inspiring educational innovation, and the degree to which she has influenced postsecondary nursing education.”
The funny thing, Coffey says, is that nursing wasn’t on her agenda at all when she initially signed up for a degree in neuroscience from the University of Toronto. But three years into her studies, with no clear career path in sight, she had a lifechanging chat with her brother’s girlfriend, who was just finishing a nursing program. “She suggested I think about it,” Coffey says.
Coffey did, and two days before the application deadline at George Brown College, she switched gears and enrolled. “I fell into nursing,” she says. “And it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I have loved it from the very first day I started classes.”
What keeps Coffey engaged, she says, is the complexity, au- tonomy and level of responsibility associated with the profession. “It’s tremendously rewarding and yet very difficult,” she says. “It’s a career that allows you to bring everything you have and build on your strengths while continuing to find new opportunities to grow and to be intimately involved in helping people.”
In the years after she graduated nursing, Coffey continued to pursue her education, earning a master’s degree followed by a PhD in nursing. She didn’t specifically have teaching in mind as an end goal, she says. “I just kept going back to school because I loved studying nursing. Every time I went back I felt rejuvenated and more committed than ever.”
When she made the leap to teaching in 2001, she found a new passion. “I loved it,” she says. “It was a dream job.”
In the years since, Coffey has taken a collaborative approach to developing curriculum with an eye to what is happening in the real world. She has “long recognized that traditional methods of teaching may no longer best fit the kind of student in today’s classrooms,” Anyinam says. Her most recent project: a graphic novel on the opioid crisis that she hopes will reach learners in a new way.
“For me innovation is the cornerstone of nursing education,” Coffey says. “There’s never a moment when an educator should say, ‘Well, I’m just going to sit back and teach what I taught last year or the year before.’ It’s so critical that I prepare learners for the world they’re going to be handling, and that they hopefully have a hand in creating.”