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Nurse on the front lines of health care Heather Lange Northern News Services Published Friday, May 13, 2011
May 9 to 15 is National Nursing Week, a celebration of Canadian nurses and their dedication to patient care and the health care system, and Leslie embodies that role.
Leslie, 57, can been seen every so often at the Yellowknife Day Shelter on 51 Street where she treats the downtrodden and homeless, aside from the many other health services she provides in the city. "I wanted to be in the helping profession, I wanted to help people. It felt very natural to go into nursing. It wasn't a debate in my mind," said Leslie. She grew up in northern Ontario during the 1950s and 1960s when there was a narrower view on what careers women could enter, but nursing seems like a natural fit for Leslie. In 1973, she graduated from Mack Training School of Nursing in St. Catharines, Ont. Her husband found a job as a laboratory technician at Stanton Territorial Hospital in Yellowknife in 1985 so the two packed up and headed North. She started right away as a nurse at the hospital, and then moved her way up to nursing manager, and then with various management positions at the Department of Health and Social Services. "Yellowknife has been an amazing place to work for my career. In management, it was my job to make the nursing staff's job easier," said Leslie. Four years ago, Leslie decided she wanted to return to front-line nursing so she became a public health nurse at the city's Public Health Unit. She volunteered with the Anglican Diocese in the Central American country of Belize during her vacation for the past five years, working in clinics and educating health staff there, and that work had a major part to play in her decision to return to the role in Yellowknife. "I began to appreciate the simpler things in life. My point of view changed because of volunteer work. Being in front-line nursing helped me with my volunteer work. I need to be effective and I needed to be current," said Leslie. "People learn best one-on-one at a person-to-person level. You can put on information sessions or go into the schools and educate them on sexual health, but the real understanding happens on a person-to-person basis," said Leslie. Leslie's current job has three main components to it: screening, education and prevention. She uses the analogy of the public health unit being "upstream" from health care problems - seeing the health-care problem and preventing it before it becomes a major problem for the community. "Public health is upstream, preventing people from dying from tetanus," said Leslie. Every two weeks she goes into the Yellowknife Day Shelter as part of an outreach service. The nurses involved do drug prevention education, immunizations, sexual health screening, and referrals for further health care. "We are the face of public health to those who don't come to public health. You can't just sit back and tell people to come to their appointments. Just because people make certain lifestyle choices, they still deserve care. Through our outreach program, we have reduced the amount of visits to doctors," said Leslie. The other major part of her job is serving on the communicable disease team at Public Health dealing with tuberculosis. She diagnoses TB patients, monitors them and delivers medications directly. This means sometimes doing home visits to administer medications. Her work brings her many places but she seems the most passionate about her work with the outreach program at the Day Shelter. "We provide non-judgmental care. To judge is to blame the victim. Everyone has a story on the street," said Leslie.
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