CASN is pleased to announce that the 2024 Woodend Clinical Education Grant recipient is Salwa Musa.

I am a Registered Nurse, PhD student in the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Alberta, and a Professor at the Sally Horsfall Eaton School of Nursing at George Brown College. With over 16 years of experience in pediatric critical care, public health, and nursing education, I am dedicated to advancing equity, cultural safety, and inclusive approaches to clinical nursing education.

My diverse clinical experiences have shaped my deep understanding of the importance of nursing care that fosters trust, cultural safety, and respectful engagement to support optimal health outcomes. In pediatric critical care, I witnessed how moments where the medical model integrated cultural practices had a profound and lasting impact on patient and family engagement—often facilitated through the nursing therapeutic relationship. In public health, meaningful engagement with underserved community members proved essential for delivering equitable care and improving outcomes. Building these long-term partnerships required trust, collaboration, and consistent culturally safe care—principles that became even more critical during the COVID-19 pandemic, which disproportionately impacted racialized communities in both infection rates and vaccine uptake. Similarly, the ongoing drug poisoning crisis has had a disproportionate impact on socioeconomically underserved populations, revealing systemic gaps in accessible, responsive care.

My doctoral research investigates barriers to accessing health services for equity-deserving populations, with a particular focus on African, Black, and Caribbean (ABC) communities in Canada. Using a community-based participatory research approach, I explore how services—although present—often remain inaccessible, contributing to widening health inequities. In particular, I examine how substance use and harm reduction services can serve as vital entry points to wraparound primary care, especially for communities facing persistent systemic barriers. Nurses, as leaders in direct patient care, are critical to shaping how clients engage with the health system and whether they experience safety, trust, and continuity in care.

The project supported by the Woodend Clinical Education Research Grant extends this focus into nursing education. At George Brown College, I am studying how virtual patient simulations in an in-class health assessment course can strengthen nursing students’ competencies in care assessment, clinical reasoning, and culturally safe and responsive decision-making. Drawing on my experiences as a racialized nurse in clinical care, public health, and as a clinical instructor, I have seen firsthand the impact of culturally appropriate care—and the harm caused when it is absent. By embedding real-time, interactive simulations that mirror the complexities of patient health needs, barriers to primary care, and the importance of building trusting therapeutic relationships, this project aims to prepare graduates to engage with patients and clients with sensitivity, clinical readiness, and culturally safe care.

I am honoured to receive this grant and truly grateful to CASN’s Research and Scholarship Committee for recognizing the potential of my research to advance clinical nursing education. This grant will provide the support needed to conduct this important exploratory study and to disseminate findings to educational stakeholders across Canada.

CASN is pleased to announce that the 2024 Woodend Clinical Education Grant recipient is Amrita Sondhi-Cooke.

I am a full-time student in the Master of Science program in the School of Nursing at McMaster University and a fierce RN dedicated to social justice. As an emerging leader in nursing education and as an advocate for equity, diversity, and inclusion, my research goals are to combine emancipatory pedagogy, clinical research, and nursing scholarship by exploring the prevalence of violence and racism experienced by nursing students in clinical placements, and the effects of these incidents on the well-being of nursing students.

My clinical background includes inpatient acute care, vaccination clinics and hospital care coordination. Through recent years, I have dedicated myself to nursing education through a clinical teaching role. I have had the privilege to work with different nursing schools as a clinical teacher and supervise students in various streams and levels of the program across multiple clinical settings within various organizations and cities. As an educator I have built my teaching philosophy grounded in the experiences working with nursing students over several semesters. My teaching philosophy is based on a learner-focused approach in a safe inclusive environment. Due to the complexities of the nursing discipline, as an educator I believe that learners require strength-based individualized support models that address the unique needs of each student. More importantly, my experiences working with nursing students during clinical placements have emphasized the need for safe environments to optimize learning and protect the well-being of students; this has overall influenced my pursuit of a Master’s degree. My Master’s research project is titled “Prevalence, Associated Factors, and Impact of Violence and Racism Experienced by Nursing Students in Clinical Placements”.

With over five years of experience collaborating with nursing students across the nursing spectrum as both a clinician and clinical instructor, I have identified facilitators and barriers to learning that students experience in their clinical education. My research interests are shaped by not only my lived experiences of violence and racism as a racialized nurse, but more importantly, by my experiences working with nursing students in clinical placements. Many nursing students have described to me the violence and racism they experience in their clinical placements and through these experiences I have identified an opportunity to address gaps within Canadian nursing education to strengthen supports for students and reduce the trauma that is being experienced. The effects of violence and racism can be devastating, and I have become passionate to advocate for change with a goal to reduce the incidents and trauma experienced by nursing students, and to provide clinical instructors as well as educational institutions with tools to support learning in safe environments.

I am extremely thrilled to have received the CASN Woodend Clinical Education Research Grant! This grant will provide the support needed to conduct this important exploratory study and to disseminate the findings to educational stakeholders across Canada. I am truly thankful, and I express my sincere gratitude to CASN’s Research and Scholarship Committee for recognizing the potential of my research to further clinical nursing education.

Amrita Jessica Sondhi-Cooke

CASN is pleased to announce that the 2023 Woodend Clinical Education Grant recipient is VJ Gibbins.

I am very proud to be a Registered Nurse, a PhD Candidate, and an Associate Teaching Professor of Nursing at the University of Alberta! I joined the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Alberta fulltime in January 2013. I have taught in clinical, lab, simulation, and both small and large lectures. My first nursing role, however, was as a summer camp nurse in Maine, USA. Camp came to be part of me and who I developed into, celebrating my 25th summer (over 26 years) this past August! My husband is also a nurse and we got married at camp and together with our 14 year old daughter, return to camp each summer.

Learning through play is a cornerstone of the summer camp experience and a tenet of my teaching and learning philosophy which propelled me to undertake doctoral studies at the University of Alberta. My research interests lay in how we learn to become nurses. My doctoral research project is titled Exploring Undergraduate Nursing Students’ Experience of Clinical Course Failure Through the Lens of Achievement Motivation. Underpinning this project is my belief that discourse about why students struggle and fail in clinical wrongly focuses on knowledge deficits and weak skill performance. An assumption I make is that all students come to clinical with the same theoretical and practical preparation. Certainly there are students who come without appropriate preparation or skill practice, but that is part of what clinical is intended for – to learn how to put those pieces together in practice. So why are some students unable to do so? This project aims to investigate if there are common motivational beliefs among students who struggle or fail in their clinical learning. Motivational theories are more complex than simple carrot and stick conceptualizations of internal and external motivations. How we perceive ourselves as learners, our abilitty to learn, what constitutes learning, and what it means to our self-esteem and self-identity when we realize we have a learning need are, in my belief, the largely unaddressed components of the learning process in clinical nursing education. Understanding if or how these components contribute to clinical learning outcomes is a first step towards developing targeted interventions that may remove barriers to success for those at-risk students.

I am very grateful to have received the inaugural CASN Woodend Clinical Education Research Grant. This grant will help me interview nursing students from across Canada who have struggled in or failed their nursing clinical courses. Achievement motivation research is typically quantitative in nature. My study is a first to include current nursing students who are actively experiencing the consequences of their struggling or failure experiences. It is also a first to analyze these experiences qualitatively through the lens of achievement motivation assessing for elements of mindsets, goal types, expectancy value, attributions, emotions, interests, and self-determination. I offer my thanks and sincere gratitude to the CASN Education Committee for their support and acknowledgement of the importance of this research.