figure 11: "A Stack of Results"

“Rather than creating an aesthetic piece, as my artistic skills are not the greatest, I chose to provide real life photos of my experience during COVID-19. I took many photos during COVID-19, but when reviewing the criteria for this research proposal, two stood out. I chose to upload this photo as it was both moment a of great breakdown and great strength. In this photo, I am holding a huge stack of paperwork that is ALL COVID-19 swabbing from staff and their results. As an occupational health nurse, folks minimize the role that we play in ensuring that FRONTLINE workers are safe to work with patients. We have to send staff for swabbing, with great reluctance on both ends, and sift through all of the results after, update files, follow up with results, notify of the results, document the results, flag if positive, contact trace if positive, send back to work if negative, manage COVID-19 pay… The stack of papers we were holding was a very proud moment for all of the occupational health nurses when we had finally finished going through an overdue stack of hundreds of hundreds of results. We took this photo to send to our director who was on vacation at the time in a hot sunny country (luckily he/she was one of the last individuals to leave the county for vacation prior to borders closing). We expected our director to praise us for finally sifting through the never ending pile we were swamped in struggling to work from 7am to 10pm almost daily. In pandemic guidelines, criteria indicates there should be at least 9 full time nurses. In our organization, we have 2 full part, and 2 part time (including myself as part time). What is significant about this photo is that while we were waiting for some sort of excitement or praise from our director, we saw that she had seen the photo and hours later replied with “Kk”. This became the running joke within our department unfortunately because even a great job! nice! or anything positive would have not made us feel completely inept.

I am very grateful to have completed the MN program and learned the value of leadership. Given the negative reaction we faced from this photo as above mentioned, I can appreciate the difference between having a director that has higher education or any sort of leadership education and one who does not. Based on my nursing education and practice, I hope to be the kind of leader that consistently commends my team on jobs well done an appreciates effort by staff. COVID-19 really allowed me and many of my MN peers to understand what “good management” looks like, and what not so good looks like – as frequently vocalized in many virtual classes. It was either really hit or really miss. I hope that based on COVID-19 I will understand and in the future remember the impact that COVID had on the organization, department, and at a lower level – the individual impact it had to each nurse when a simple “good job” was too much to ask for.

Overall, I appreciate that COVID-19 made its inevitable debut during the last semester of MN as it gave me the most experience and reward. I was able to really piece together the whole program of leadership and education and use it as an example to recognize wonderful leaders whom I want to resemble, and other leaders who I hope can gain a good sense of leadership for future workers. I learned that being in a leadership position does not make you a leader. Being a good leader in a leadership position, makes you a good leader. Ability to step back and allow my team to have praise through their dedication and hard work whilst I support them would be the kind of leader I would like to be. Without good leadership, my colleagues and myself learned to rely on and each other during this pandemic.”