national nursing week
Joanne Profetto-McGrath presented with Lifetime Achievement Award
From her humble beginnings in a small Italian town, Joanne Profetto-McGrath learned early on the value and importance of caring for the people in her community.
This belief has remained throughout her nursing career and is at the core of why Profetto-McGrath was selected for this year’s College and Association of Registered Nurses of Alberta (CARNA) Lifetime Achievement Award in Nursing Excellence.
With a career that has spanned nearly four decades, Profetto-McGrath earned her undergraduate and nursing degrees in 1979 at the University of Windsor, which is where she first honed her leadership skills, serving as vice president at what is now the Canadian Nursing Student Association.
Following graduation and a move west to Alberta, Profetto-McGrath immediately began volunteering with what is now CARNA.
“I always felt it was important as a member of a regulated profession to not only be a member, but that we actually work with others to shape CARNA and to move it forward,” Profetto-McGrath said in an interview for CARNA earlier this year. “Each one of us is CARNA, so we need to be involved rather than just be the recipients of what CARNA does for us.”
During her time in Edmonton at the Royal Alexandra Hospital (RAH) in the early 1980s, Profetto-McGrath’s clinical work focused on medical/ surgical nursing, and it became clear to her that this area of work was very specialized and should have a certificate of its own. After several years of work towards this goal, she helped bring this dream to fruition when a national Medical-Surgical Certificate was established in 2007.
Those early years of nursing at RAH also saw Profetto-McGrath not only working as a staff nurse, but also as a mentor and nursing educator at their School of Nursing. During that time, she not only loved to teach, but she also began working towards her own Master’s Degree in Educational Administration, which she earned from the University of Alberta in 1988.
In 1999, Profetto-McGrath followed this up with a PhD in Nursing, also from the University of Alberta, where she now serves as Vice Dean in the Faculty of Nursing.
Regardless of what role she has held over the years, whether it was bedside, instructional or administrative, Profetto-McGrath has said, “the one thing I have never forgotten is that, at the centre of everything we do, is the patient.”
And while she concedes that, as Vice Dean of the Faculty, she is quite removed from the front lines in patient care, she is mindful that “the things that [she is] involved with all, in one way or another, contribute to the optimal, most ethical and competent patient care.”
Though a lifetime achievement award is often a recognition presented to people who are at the end of their professional lives and are preparing to go off into the sunset of retirement, it is clear this is not the case for Profetto-McGrath. The University of Alberta, CARNA and the global profession of nursing is sure to see great things from her in the future, as she continues to pursue excellence at all levels in the field of nursing.