When Kyla Cullain began her Bachelor of Science in Nursing program, the jobs she envisioned were straight out of primetime TV: bustling around an emergency room, or scrubbing in for a shift in the OR.
She certainly didn’t imagine she’d be running a construction company.
The path that led to the founding of BuildAble, a unique nurse-managed company specializing in accessible home and workplace renovations, began during her community health placement early in the four-year program.
”I fell in love with community (nursing). I never expected that to happen. We were part of a program called Leave the Pack Behind and it was encouraging people to quit smoking and do it the right way. We made a giant cigarette costume for one of our friends… and we made quite the splash here at the College walking around and encouraging people to quit smoking.
“When we had that community health placement, it opened up my eyes. It was this whole other world of nursing that I didn’t expect. It seemed bigger than everything — population health. You could help entire communities.”
Since graduating in 2008, Cullain has done just that. In her six years with Ottawa Public Health, she worked on communicable disease management and on infection control in long-term care facilities. As a volunteer, she has helped with disaster relief projects in Sri Lanka and Haiti. And since 2014, her company has been helping people with mobility issues overcome physical barriers where they live and work.
The idea for Next Step Transitions came when she left public health to pursue a Master of Nursing – which she approached with the same strong community focus.
During that time, by chance, she and her husband helped an older couple install a stairlift in their home. The project opened her eyes. “There was this whole psycho-social aspect (to the renovation) I’d never thought about.”
While there are any number of companies producing accessibility products, says Cullain, “the more I did my research, the more I realized there was no one approaching how to help people stay in their homes, or open up communities to be accessible, from a health-care perspective.”
Cullain says Algonquin College prepared her well for the surprising turns her career has taken. “It was a lot of work, it was tough, but we were so well-supported here our entire four years. It was an amazing journey.”
“The professors here were phenomenal. If there were any questions you had after class, if something didn’t quite make sense, they always took the time to make sure you were going to be set up to succeed wherever you went — whether within a hospital community, or starting your own business.”
And that support didn’t stop with graduation, Cullain says. “There was always this continuing engagement which was really lovely and really supportive. It was nice to know you could always go back to the professors. No matter how old you were, or how far along in your career you were, you’d have that ongoing support.”
Cullain counsels current nursing students not to restrict their options: “Have an open mind about where nursing can take you. The best part about this field, or trade, or profession… is that it can really take you wherever you want to go.
“If you keep an open mind,” she advises, “you’ll see so many different parts of the health care system and how you can contribute. It’s pretty phenomenal.”
You could say the shoe fit for Chelsea Jones at Algonquin College.
Chelsea Jones remembers being surprised during the very first class of her Business Administration – Marketing program at Algonquin College back in 2003. The professor told the Introduction to Finance class that there were only two types of businesses in the world: those that sold products and those that sold services. Read more >
“Never limit yourself, seize new opportunities when they present themselves, and your career can take you anywhere you can dream.”
Those are Frederick Montpetit’s words of advice for students in Nursing, the Algonquin College program he graduated from in 2001. Moreover, they are words he has lived by.
Nursing has taken Montpetit to Canada’s far north, far west and dead centre, and opened the door to rich experiences that even this adventurous alumnus might not have imagined. It is the style of learning fostered by the Nursing program that made his diverse career possible, Montpetit explains — though he didn’t appreciate it at the time.
“Through a good part of my first and second year, I remember thinking, ‘God, I wish they’d give up on this problem-based learning. I wish they would just tell me what I need to know to graduate,’” he recalls. “Instead, my professors… put a problem in front of me and said, ‘OK, solve it.’ And I hated it.”
“And then I went on to the real world where you’ve not been trained in every circumstance, so you need to find the answer,” Montpetit says. “They taught us in the Nursing program how to think, and they taught how to learn, and I am so grateful because it doesn’t matter what the circumstances (are), I have the skillset to go find an answer.”
That skillset served him well as an emergency nurse in a Winnipeg hospital right after graduation. When the opportunity arose, he was also well prepared to adapt to the health care challenges in the remote Nunavut community of Rankin Inlet. Hired as a community health care nurse, Montpetit’s problem-solving abilities had him rising the administrative ranks of his profession. After a stint as regional manager of public health, he was tapped by the territorial government to serve as a nursing director in Nunavut’s Health and Social Services department.
In 2008, Montpetit was named to the newly created position of Chief Nursing Officer for Nunavut, responsible for forming and implementing nursing policy and strategy in the territory – a place where frontline nurses play a significant role in health care.
Two years ago, after 11 years in the north, Montpetit moved to Ucluelet on the outer west coast of Vancouver Island, where he practices once again as a hands-on community health care nurse.
“It’s been a delightful change because it’s a return to engaging people,” Montpetit says, noting that’s why he got into nursing in the first place. His College experience is front-of-mind these days: in September, he was honoured as an Algonquin College Alumni of Distinction, receiving the 2017 Health Sciences award; and he was also the institution’s Health Sciences nominee for the 2017 Premier’s Awards.
“Algonquin taught us as nursing students to be holistic, to look at the entire person. You’re not looking at a fractured limb, you’re not looking at a cut arm, but you are looking at a person — and that fractured limb has an impact of their life that affects all different pieces of it.”
You might say Montpetit’s experience of his profession is also holistic – from providing primary health care to making the policy that makes the delivery of health care effective. “Nursing is so broad and so deep and it spans such a huge scope,” he says. Future graduates shouldn’t limit themselves, he says.