Community nurse goes beyond basic care
Jasmina Topalovic has made ‘a great deal of difference’ in 93-year-old client’s life
The art-filled midtown apartment, with its airy views of the city, is a long way from Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, where Jasmina Topalovic began her nursing career more than 20 years ago. It was her hometown, but then there was a war. Topalovic was forced to move, first to Germany and then across the Atlantic, where she finally met Shirley Koffman.
Koffman is 93 and Topalovic has been her community nurse since 2009. The two women have developed a bond that goes beyond patient and caregiver.
Koffman has medical conditions that require constant maintenance and she noticed Topalovic was always going beyond the mere professional demands of her job in a consistent effort to improve her quality of life.
Koffman nominated her nurse for the Toronto Star’s 2017 Nightingale Awards and Topalovic has been named a recipient of an honourable mention.
“She put herself into it,” Koffman says about the kind of care Topalovic delivers. “She made my life what it was, and at my age, you need that kind of help.”
Topalovic is a community nurse with ParaMed, a Toronto-based home health-care provider — a job she arrived at only after many uncertain years that began when the war in the former Yugoslavia spread to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992. Her desire to be a nurse, however, began when, as a young girl, she required a gruelling series of operations on her hand. “As a kid, I observed other nurses and how they did their job, and I admired them,” Topalovic recalls. “Of course, sometimes you like a person and sometimes you don’t, and as a kid, all those who cared for me so gently and carefully, I appreciated it so much, and I even remember their names. Everything you want others to do for you, you do for others.”
The war forced her to complete her studies in Dusseldorf, Germany, and even after the war ended, she decided to move to Canada in 1997. It took a long time to get her diplomas and paperwork certified by the College of Nurses here, so she got jobs as a personal support worker (PSW), assisting nurses and doctors. For a while, she was planning on going to medical school with the Canadian Armed Forces, “but then, I got married.” She was a PSW when she joined ParaMed in 2002, training other PSWs for the company out of its Oakville office while waiting for her paperwork to get approved. In 2004, her nursing credentials finally established, she was offered a move to the company’s Toronto offices, which meant taking assignments all over the GTA.
Koffman, a widow, became a client of ParaMed in 2009, utilizing the service through several hospitalizations and surgeries. She noticed Topalovic often went the extra mile, visiting her in the hospital after surgery and during bouts of pneumonia.
It all meant “a great deal of difference in my life,” says Koffman, who was able to recuperate enough to return to playing bridge, watching movies and socializing with friends.
“Patients are my life,” Topalovic says.
“I go to their homes, and when they come back from the hospital, they need a lot — not only the treatment; there are so many things involved, from getting them involved with social workers, occupational therapists, communicating with the hospital, with family doctors and pharmacists. Anything that involves getting them back to the everyday activities that they had before they became ill. That’s what they really need. That’s what I would love if I were in that situation one day.”
Community nursing faces several challenges, according to Topalovic, mostly due to its low public profile.
“A lot of people don’t know we exist — quite a lot, when I come to a patient for the first time, they worry that they have to pay. Then, we start from the beginning, explaining how it works and everything that can be done — they start the treatment in the hospital and we take absolutely everything over in the community.”
For Koffman, the greatest gift community nurses and home healthcare workers can give someone like her is time.
“Just to show some genuine interest instead of just making a call.”
For Topalovic, excellent community nursing begins with training.
“What needs to happen in the future is the new grad nurses, we have to train them, because to be a community (nurse) is a big difference from a nurse that works in the hospital or a doctor’s office.
“As a community nurse, you have to have a lot of specialties, covering a huge spectrum of diseases. Mrs. Koffman is my easiest client — thank God for that. For others that need a lot — I have a lot of complex wound care, there’s dialysis, intravenous therapies, oncology patients with cancer, to pregnant women crying every day that they need medication to sustain that pregnancy.
“I would like the new nurses to see that they have more opportunities to get trained in the community, to deal with this wide variety of illness that we are dealing with outside the hospital. People recover faster in home settings.
“I have friends all over the world — because of the war, people from my country went everywhere and we are still in touch . . . the health system in Canada is excellent. It’s just that sometimes, we don’t appreciate it.”