Jennifer Kryworuchko
Associate Professor, School of Nursing, The University of British Columbia
Registered Nurse, Critical Care – Class of 1996
The Algonquin College community is saddened to announce Jennifer’s passing. Our condolences are being sent to her family. We encourage you to read the in memoriam message published by the College.
Jennifer Kryworuchko devoted much of her work as a nursing researcher to studying the organization and delivery of health care services to optimize patient and family involvement in health decision making and to improve access to palliative care.
Her community-engaged scholarship — intended to influence practical changes in policy, system design and care delivery — focused on ensuring that seriously ill individuals, with their families and medical team, are engaged in shared decision-making about the end-of-life care they desire.
That research has appeared in the American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Medicine, Implementation Science and BMJ Open, and brought her multiple honours and awards. One project in particular, the development of a CPR video decision aid, was endorsed and funded by the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada.
Kryworuchko earned her Bachelor of Science in Nursing at the University of Ottawa and became a Nursing Officer in the Canadian Armed Forces. While she was a military nurse, she earned a Critical Care Nursing Diploma at Algonquin College (Class of 1996). She called it an important step along her educational path, which eventually included a Graduate Diploma in Health Services and Policy Research and PhD in Nursing, both completed at the University of Ottawa.
“I really appreciated my college courses,” she says. “They went into a lot of depth and helped me understand critical care in ICU in a way I hadn’t before. In many ways, my college experience impacted my whole career. It helped me be a better nurse at the bedside. It gave me greater confidence as a teacher and clinician. Taking those additional courses gave me an appetite for graduate studies and helped me become a better researcher. I have absolutely become a better teacher since my critical care courses. They helped me learn the nursing case knowledge that has turned out to be invaluable to my undergraduate nursing students.”
Over time, Kryworuchko worked as a clinical staff nurse in a range of Canadian Forces medical surgical and rehabilitation units, a staff nurse at the Ottawa Hospital Intensive Care Unit, and held a tenured faculty position at the University of Saskatchewan and was a tenured Associate Professor in the School of Nursing at the University of British Columbia, as well as a Research Scientist with the BC Centre for Palliative Care.
She became interested in end-of-life care while she was working in critical care, where patients and families were not always being involved in their own health decision-making. She saw the need to help people in ICU live well longer and die well. By developing a video tool and an app to energize end-of-life conversations, it engaged all the participants in the decision-making process — not least nurses, whose role in health care and communicating with patients and families is frequently undervalued.
“I feel very strongly nurses have an important role in helping patients and families understand what’s going on in serious illness, and particularly in the end of life stages,” she says. “Nurses are ideally positioned to communicate the route to self-care. People really need to be informed and have their questions answered, and with something like the video decision aid nurses have a tool that helps facilitate these conversations.”
Communication about CPR is complicated and difficult, she said in a research seminar discussion about the video decision aid, and of course there are always people who are going to be more challenging to communicate with. “Patients have a hard time understanding for health literacy reasons, for emotional readiness reasons, what interventions like CPR or intensive care will mean to them in the context of their own lives.”
The video decision aid is available for free on Vimeo at https://vimeo.com/48147363; a related booklet can be found at https://decisionaid.ohri.ca/
An app is in development. The decision aid was designed to improve understanding of care available in Intensive Care Units, and its outcomes. Having worked in critical care for 15 years, she knows people have a limited idea of what CPR is and what choosing to undergo it means.
“People think after CPR you just go home. It’s not true. You are most likely going to be living in the hospital on life support. You’re a critically ill person, your heart is irritable. You might need a ventilator to help you breathe, and you might need CPR again. If you choose CPR, you should know what would follow. People should get the care that they want, and not more than that.”