News Archives: Karen Oostra: Thinks Like a Nurse
Thursday, August 1st, 2024
Karen Oostra at the Health Education Centre
What does it mean to think like a nurse? Ask any of Karen Oostra’s former students.
Karen has been teaching nursing at NWP since 2010. In that time, she has received numerous comments and compliments from students. Students appreciate her enthusiastic teaching style, her inclusive classroom, and her attention to detail, but the comment she remembers and cherishes most has to do with training students to develop a nurse’s mindset.
“When a student says ‘Karen teaches us to think like a nurse’, that’s a great compliment because it means they’re ready for what the job will throw at them,” Karen says.
So, what exactly is thinking like a nurse? As Karen explains it, thinking like a nurse is about having a high degree of situational awareness. It is about recognizing your environment, the people around you, assessing needs, risks and considering solutions. It’s a bit like being a mini-detective but in a clinical sense.
“Thinking like a nurse is going into the patient or client environment and really actively noticing things. We would call it the nursing process or clinical judgment model,” Karen says. “Asking a lot of questions like, what is happening? What do I see? What does it mean? How can I help the patient? What advice would I give them? Which interventions or what actions would I expect that the doctor would do? That’s thinking like a nurse.”
It isn’t easy to teach students how to adopt a mindset. It takes strong communication skills to translate specific nursing skills into a form of pedagogy students can grasp. Thankfully, Karen’s background in public health prepared her to make complex ideas easy to understand.
“I worked as a public health nurse here in Grande Prairie for 17 years,” Karen says. “I was always interested in the health promotion aspect of it. I liked the idea of being part of campaigns for disease prevention.”
When a public health campaign is successful in changing people’s behaviours and adopting healthier habits, it has the curious effect of making those past behaviours seem almost silly in retrospect - even though the struggle for change required consistent messaging directed at people who typically resist change. Karen experienced this working on seatbelt and anti-smoking public health campaigns.
“At that time, people were still smoking indoors and still smoking in their cars. They would drive their kids on their laps and not making sure their kids were restrained,” Karen says. “I found it all fascinating. Working with those people, helping them understand the risks. Injury, prevention illness prevention. Communicable Disease Control. I loved my career in public health.”
In 2010, Karen decided to make a career change. She applied for a job at NWP and has taught nursing there ever since. The early days, however, were challenging for Karen particularly because her background was in public health which meant she didn’t have a lot of clinical experience.
“It was a very steep learning curve for me because I started teaching in the hospital,” Karen explains. “I had to buckle down and do a lot of reading. I went in for eight straight days and had a buddy nurse take care of me so I could become more familiar. And finally she said you know you got to quit coming here. You got this, you'll be fine.”
Though Karen has become more comfortable teaching - getting her Masters in Education in 2015 has helped - she says the nerves and stress never go away. She worries about students, about how the day will go, even about her alarm going off at 5:30 AM so she can make it to the hospital on time. But the nerves are part of what make Karen an excellent teacher. It shows she cares. It shows that she’s paid close attention to what her students need, to the learning environment, and to the day-to-day challenge of being a teacher. Considering her hyper situational awareness, you could say that it shows even as a teacher, Karen still thinks like a nurse.
When she’s not teaching Karen enjoys learning to play guitar, hearing live music of all kinds, going camping with her husband in their old Volkswagen van, running and hiking with friends and hanging out with her adult kids.
