An Interview With Community Health Nurse Educator and Researcher Tanya Sanders Une entrevue avec la professeure et chercheuse en sciences infirmières, en santé communautaire, Tanya Sanders

In this interview, Co-Editor-in-Chief Susan Duncan speaks with Dr. Tanya Sanders, Associate Teaching Professor at Thompson Rivers University, to learn her perspectives and insights both in her role as co-chair of the Community Health Interest Group of the Canadian Association of Schools of Nursing (CASN) and in her work as a community health nursing educator and researcher over many decades. One of the key features in creating effective change is including the knowledge, voice, and presence of nurses. There are many policy conversations and planning taking place. It is essential to ensure that nurses are a part of those conversations and engaged in the leadership and development of new primary care models. In primary care, nurses have a key role to play in working with both the team (nurse practitioners, family physicians, social work, pharmacy) and with the population and communities being served. Collaborative models have the potential to strengthen access and to look at care more holistically. Alongside the one-to-one biomedically focused care that needs to be provided, nurses are well positioned to open that up and look from primary prevention all the way through to palliative care and to bring that perspective of community needs and engagement to the models of primary care so that they are meeting community needs and population needs. I think that is where nurses are uniquely positioned to also articulate and look for unmet needs in populations and communities. There is a lot of opportunity to engage and to advance existing knowledge that nurses have from primary care work. We’ve seen that with the Canadian Family Practice Nurses Association. They have led the development of competencies for nurses in primary care and have identified themselves as a national voice for nurses in providing some supports and role clarity, which is important as we move forward. The competencies that the Canadian Family Practice Nurses Association published in 2019 identify the unique contributions that registered nurses can make in primary care and will help inform curricula as well. They fit within the national framework for baccalaureate-prepared nurses in terms of that broader scope of structural determinants and health equity and population health, partnering with communities, as well as the ability to assess and develop relationships and provide quality care on a one-to-one basis. With the work with the Canadian Association Schools of Nursing with our Community Health Interest Group, we prepared a companion document to go alongside the National Education Framework from CASN to support nurse educators in Canada with suggestions around skills, knowledge, learning outcomes, and exemplars to support the integration and strengthening of community health perspectives in undergraduate education. We are actively having conversations and working collaboratively to share resources with nurse educators to support those who are looking to strengthen curricula. This will be important for primary health care provision to ensure we strengthen community health nursing education so that nurses are able to meet the needs of communities and populations. In the 2020 World Health Organization report on the state of the world’s nursing, there is strong language that identifies that nurse education programs must have” nurses who drive progress in primary health care and universal health coverage” and that nursing leadership and governance is critical to strengthening the nursing workforce and health. This speaks volumes to where we are at and supports the work that we need to continue to do around that sustained leadership and support for the faculty who are engaged in the community health nursing work including primary care. Sometimes there are only one or two folks in a school of nursing, but really supporting them in …