Honours nursing grad embraces the joys and challenges of rural emergency care
Sasha Roeder-Mah - 7 June 2023
Skanda Kaushik
Skanda Kaushik, ’23 BSc (Nursing with Honors), will never forget the first time he got to respond to a patient’s needs all on his own. Having completed his coursework, he had just transitioned from his role as undergraduate nurse — which involved constant supervision by a registered nurse — into a new position as graduate nurse. “For the first time in my nursing career, I could perform tasks by myself and at first, that was very nerve-wracking. It took me a while to stop saying, ‘Oh, let me just go grab your nurse for you’ as I realized that now I was, in fact, that nurse!”
Now a proud graduate of the Faculty of Nursing, Kaushik is working full time in the emergency department of the Devon General Hospital and looks forward to completing his certification later this summer. As an undergraduate nurse, he split his time between the internal medicine and palliative medicine wards in Edmonton’s Royal Alexandra Hospital. But after a preceptorship in Devon, he knew rural care was where his heart was. “I fell in love with it,” he remembers.
“I’d never seen such a strong community,” he says when asked about working in a small-town setting. “You are able to achieve a whole different level of patient-centred care, and you get to know patients and their families more, so I’m finding the discharge planning can often be more robust.”
Long before he ended up in Devon’s emergency department, Kaushik was a high-school graduate with a passion for learning, a fascination with how the body works and a deep desire to try to mend it when it doesn’t. He was interested in a career in health, but he wasn’t sure what path made the most sense for him until he learned more about nursing.
“There’s a beauty to nursing in that it’s both an art and a science,” he says. There’s the detective work of using one’s academic background to figure out what the problem is, and then there’s the therapeutic relationships nurses have the privilege of building with patients and their loved ones. “I’ve held the hand of individuals who are about to pass, of an infant in respiratory distress,” says Kaushik. “I never imagined how intense the gratification would be in moments like that, in moments of raw human connection.”
Kaushik is the first person in his family to go into the health professions, but he had plenty of inspiration to work hard from both of his parents. In particular, he credits his mom, who has a PhD, for inspiring his love of learning — something he believes is key to a long and happy career in nursing. The honours program was the perfect outlet for what he calls his “inquisitive nature,” giving him plenty of opportunities to delve deeper into topics of interest through significant research projects.
Kaushik’s first foray into university-level research came when he joined a study led by Andrea MacLeod in the Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine, looking at the experiences of young multilingual children in school. Kaushik — who was born in India, then moved with his family to the Middle East before finally coming to Canada — speaks several languages and was fuelled by this experience to contribute what he could to making learning easier for children in school. The study resulted in an app that, among other things, helps to bridge the translation gap between children and their teachers. But for Kaushik and his academic career, it had another significant result: “Being part of Dr. MacLeod’s team created my research knowledge base for everything I’ve studied since in nursing,” he says, “and it taught me early that the beauty of research is that it sees no faculty boundaries.”
He also learned that some of the best research is guided by personal passion, a lesson he took into the main research project he pursued to fulfil his degree. After two of his uncles died in India due to sepsis caused by COVID-19, he studied how the typical approaches to sepsis — which are mostly designed in high-income countries — don’t work in low- and middle-income areas. Later in his degree, inspired by what he saw during his time in palliative care, he studied the moral distress faced by pediatric-care co-ordinators, looking at the many factors — including socioeconomic determinants such as language, gender, racialization, and more — that could influence the complexity of providing care to families with children in crisis. Watching the people he worked with cope with their moral distress, he quickly came to realize the biggest challenge he would face during his degree: “developing the high level of emotional maturity that is required in nursing.”
Now that he’s finished his degree, Kaushik is excited at the prospect of acting as a role model for other racialized individuals who may want to follow in his footsteps. “There aren’t many within the nursing profession who look like me,” he says, “and representation matters. That is so important for the current generation, so they don’t limit their potential.” And part of what he is looking forward to modelling is leadership.
Kaushik’s three years in the Nursing Undergraduate Association and a leadership preceptorship with the Government of Alberta ignited an interest in advocacy and policy-building. He and several other students also got to meet Canada’s chief nursing officer Leigh Chapman, an experience that gave him a close-up view of what meaningful leadership could look like.
“Nursing is one of the most challenging yet most rewarding professions in health care,” he says. “It’s such a great profession, because you can take it in any direction you want.” With so many interests and a clear passion for care, the future is wide open for Kaushik.
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