2026 Edmonton Nursing Research Luncheon

Meet Our Speakers:

Jessica Jenkins & Mia Mia-Bernadine Torres: Child visitors in ICU

The adult intensive care unit (ICU) is a high acuity and technical environment which historically has excluded child visitors. Today, most ICUs in Alberta have no restrictions on child visitors, but many families are hesitant to bring children to the bedside. Families may feel that the ICU is not a safe place for children, they may fear that children would find visiting critically ill family members distressing, and they may worry they do not have the capacity to support their child’s needs. When children do visit, healthcare providers (HCP) are often tasked with supporting them without developmentally appropriate training or resources to guide how to best support the child’s needs in crisis. 

Our team, funded through ANET, has embarked on a multiphase project to explore facilitators and barriers to child visitors in adult ICUs and to identify ways to support them. We have completed the first phase of this project, surveying healthcare providers about perceived facilitators and barriers to child visitors. In the next phase of research, we seek to better understand families’ perceptions of child visitors, children’s needs, and perceived barriers to visiting to create a family-centered, family-informed approach to supporting child visitors in ICU. We intend to use the outcomes of this research program to develop a framework to support child visitors that could be incorporated into ICUs across Alberta, either directly or with local adaptation as needed. Understanding family perspectives on child visitors in ICU and identifying perceived barriers, facilitators, and needs is an important next step to address this current care gap. 

Mia-Bernadine Torres has first hand experience as a child visitor in ICU which has informed her career as an nurse. Jessica Jenkins is an NP in ICU and Adjunct Faculty with the University of Calgary, Faculty of Nursing.

Mia-Bernadine Torres Jessica Jenkins

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Lauren Dobson, Sarah Southon Hryniuk, Kathryn Palamarek: Scoliosis in Children

Surgical wait times remain a significant challenge in Alberta, particularly for children requiring corrective surgery for scoliosis. At the Stollery Children’s Hospital, some children wait years for surgery, during which time their spinal curves may progress, making surgery more complex and recovery more difficult.

To help address this issue, the surgical team introduced an innovative program called Double Spine Days. On these days, two scoliosis surgeries are carefully planned and safely completed within a single operating day. This approach uses existing staff and resources with the goal of increasing surgical capacity and reducing wait times for children in need of care.

This research project will retrospectively review patient records from 2022 to 2026, matching patients by number of vertebrae fused and curve severity. The study will compare outcomes from Double Spine Days versus traditional single-spine surgery days to determine whether this model improves operating room efficiency while maintaining patient safety and quality of care. Outcomes of interest include surgical timing, postoperative pain, length of hospital stay, and overall recovery.

In addition, we will examine whether the total number of scoliosis surgeries increased in the year following the program’s implementation, led by the Stollery operative team in collaboration with research partners.

This project aims to support safe, high-quality surgical care for children with scoliosis. If successful, the Double Spine Day model could be expanded within the Stollery Children’s Hospital and adapted by other hospitals across Alberta and Canada.

Lauren Dobson, Sarah Southon Hryniuk, Kathryn Palamarek & Kathleen Shearer

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