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It was all thanks to the wine, says Denise Harrison, recalling the conversation that first brought her to Ottawa.<\/p>\n
The setting was a conference in Wales in 2010. Harrison, an Australian nurse-turned-researcher had just finished a postdoctoral fellowship at Toronto\u2019s Sick Children\u2019s Hospital, where she had been studying infant pain. By random luck she struck up a conversation with Barbara Davies, a Canadian doctor from Ottawa. While the two sipped from elegant glasses, Harrison — who says she was feeling chatty due to the alcohol — mentioned she was looking for a job. Davies immediately pointed her to the Children\u2019s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO).<\/p>\n
\u201cThere had been a position for five years and they could not fill it. I talked to my husband and we decided I\u2019d go for one interview, and if I didn\u2019t get it I\u2019d be totally happy because I really wanted to go back home,\u201d said Harrison. \u201cOf course, I went, and got the position,\u201d she laughed.<\/span><\/p>\n The job was the Chair in Nursing Care of Children, Youth and Families at CHEO, a position Harrison has held since 2011. It was the perfect match for Harrison, who always knew she wanted to work with infants and children since she was a kid.<\/p>\n \u201cNursing was my way in to babies,\u201d she said. \u201cI ended up doing what I always wanted to do but with very sick babies, not with healthy babies.\u201d<\/p>\n Born and raised in Australia, Harrison is best known for her research on pain management in babies, especially her program \u201cBe Sweet to Babies\u201d which examines how sucrose impacts babies\u2019 stress during painful procedures. It\u2019s an interest she has been exploring for years, prompted by her first nursing job at the Royal Children\u2019s Hospital in Melbourne. It was there in the paediatric intensive care unit that one incident ignited her research.<\/p>\n She was helping a physician put an IV drip in a baby who was very ill. He squirmed and began to turn blue because they were hurting him trying to insert the tube. He went from blue to grey and then white as he cried weakly. His oxygen levels went down to 40 and his heart rate dropped. The procedure had to be stopped so they could resuscitate him. Harrison was furious, telling the doctor they had to do better.<\/p>\n \u201cI said, \u2018we can no longer do this, it\u2019s unethical, this is unkind, this is horrible, and this harms babies,\u2019\u201d she recalled, stiffening at the memory. \u201cWe nearly lost this baby to a minor painful procedure.\u201d<\/p>\n From that day she set out how to research pain and hasn\u2019t stopped since.<\/p>\n \u201cYou hear babies cry, they scream, they\u2019re in pain, but we did not recognize it as [being] that important.\u201d<\/p>\n Harrison examined the issue during her master\u2019s degree in nursing at the University of Melbourne, where she looked at how sucrose affected sick older babies. She knew there was evidence that small volumes of anything sweet containing sucrose or glucose helped healthy babies and stable premature babies cope with discomfort. But she found there hadn\u2019t been much done to see how it would work on babies who weren\u2019t pre-term, who\u2019d had operations, who had congenital abnormalities, and who\u2019d had surgery.<\/p>\n Her results were that sweet things also helped the sick infants, so she decided to stay at the university to do her PhD and research further. She found Dr. Bonnie Stevens from SickKids Toronto had done most of the work with sucrose. Harrison sought Stevens out to do a post-doctoral fellowship, feeling that despite her masters and PhD, she was a clinical nurse at heart who lacked research experience.<\/p>\n She packed her bags and moved to Toronto to work with Stevens for two years. She learned more about researching, and also how to network.<\/p>\n After her post-doc came the wine in Wales, and Harrison securing her job at CHEO. As part of her position as a chair, she also teaches at the University of Ottawa. She teaches between two and four courses, including pediatrics for the third-year nurses and a research methods course for the graduate students.<\/p>\n Catherine Larocque was one of Harrison\u2019s nursing students at uOttawa who wanted to do research in pediatrics, but had no experience. Harrison took her on anyway.<\/p>\n \u201cMy first impression of her was that she was very kind. She really cares about her research and she cares about these babies and these kids who are in pain and that\u2019s kind of what drew me to her,\u201d Larocque said. \u201cAs I got to know her more, I realized she\u2019s a quant brain, she thinks about pain in terms of numbers and statistics, so she\u2019s really strong at quantitative research.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cShe\u2019s passionate, extremely intelligent, she\u2019s incredibly supportive of students. She\u2019s the only professor who will take first and second year students, and she supports us all the way through,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Larocque is now part of Harrison\u2019s research team at CHEO, which Harrison gushes is a great place to work. Every year around Halloween, the hospital runs a family flu clinic and around 1000 people get vaccinated including many babies and young children. Harrison, Larocque and the rest of the team are present each year, investigating the prevalence of pain. Every nurse\u2019s station and each injector\u2019s station has sucrose on hand. Harrison loves it, because it is putting her research into action.<\/p>\n \u201cThe aim is to reduce pain and distress in the kids, so you\u2019re not only working to do that but researching to see how effective we are at doing that. One thing we\u2019re finding is so many kids are scared of needles,\u201d she said. \u201cIt just emphasizes that we have to do these things at the beginning when they\u2019re babies.\u201d<\/p>\n Families have come back to her saying she\u2019s helped with their baby\u2019s pain management and helping the way they think about pain.<\/p>\n For all that Harrison has accomplished\u2014including publishing over 50 papers and delivering over 175 presentations on child pain management\u2014like many other researchers she has faced obstacles professionally.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cSome of [my] frustrations are with the barriers nurses tell me about. Some nurses say it takes me too long or I\u2019m too busy [to implement the pain management strategies],\u201d she said. \u201cIf you help the baby breastfeed during the needle for example, it\u2019s much easier, because they\u2019re warmer, they\u2019re calmer, they\u2019re quieter and it\u2019s easier to take their blood.\u201d<\/p>\n Val Albrecht, a midwife from Ottawa South Midwives, uses skin to skin contact and breastfeeding to reduce stress in babies and says these strategies are extremely useful.<\/p>\n \u201cIf a baby is not transitioning well, or their heart rate is off, a baby who is off a bit, if you put them skin to skin it usually settles quickly and resolves,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n As for using sucrose\u2014by feeding distressed babies sugar water\u2014it\u2019s not something that she offers because as a midwife her focus is on birthing the baby but she says she witnesses it commonly.<\/p>\n \u201cIf the baby is spending the night in the hospital and they\u2019re doing the testing and we\u2019re not there, they [can] give it for certain procedures and it seems to work.\u201d<\/p>\n Personal challenges, such as being far from Australia, have also been tough for Harrison.<\/p>\n \u201cSome of our family visits, but the younger ones, the nieces, the nephews and my friends, I\u2019ve missed out a lot on their lives. I think it\u2019s a challenge for anyone, who moves away from home,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n But she\u2019s grown to enjoy Ottawa, despite it not having the beautiful oceans she misses. As an avid runner, she says Ottawa is the best city in the world for running and she\u2019s aiming to complete the half marathon Canada Army Run this year.<\/p>\n Her focus for the future is knowledge translation\u2014figuring out the most effective ways to put her research into practice. Currently, she\u2019s in the middle of a randomized controlled trial examining the use of sucrose in sick toddlers in the hospital, to see if it works beyond one-year-olds. She also hopes to work more closely with parents.<\/p>\n \u201cWe need the parents to breastfeed and to hold the baby skin-to-skin so there are parents on my team, so it\u2019s really working in partnership with the users, and frontline people,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Larocque says Harrison is particular because \u201cshe likes things a certain way. But she\u2019s always very professional, and everything we produce is professional. Cross our T\u2019s, dot our I\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n This meticulousness has enabled Harrison to fully throw herself into her work each and every day.<\/p>\n \u201cOne thing with being a researcher is that we work a lot, but I\u2019ve never felt that it\u2019s a job; it\u2019s a life. I feel really lucky to feel that way,\u201d Harrison said.<\/p>\n Before retiring, Barbara Davies\u2019 research focused on knowledge translation and the implementation of nursing best practice guidelines to improve patient outcomes and nursing service delivery. Now Harrison is continuing where Davies left off. Harrison says her chance encounter with Davies showed the importance of networking, but she agrees she wouldn\u2019t be where she is today without fate and a dash of Sauvignon Blanc.<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [et_pb_section bb_built=”1″ _builder_version=”3.0.47″][et_pb_row _builder_version=”3.0.89″][et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_post_title _builder_version=”3.2″ title_level=”h4″ title_font_size=”38px” date=”off” categories=”off” comments=”off” featured_image=”off” \/][et_pb_image src=”https:\/\/cusjc.ca\/catalyst\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/fullsizeoutput_29f8.jpeg” _builder_version=”3.2″ \/][et_pb_text _builder_version=”3.0.89″] It was all thanks to the wine, says Denise Harrison, recalling the conversation that first brought her to Ottawa. The setting was a conference in Wales in 2010. Harrison, an Australian nurse-turned-researcher had just finished a postdoctoral fellowship […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":3466,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"project_category":[134],"project_tag":[],"class_list":["post-3463","project","type-project","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","project_category-profile"],"yoast_head":"\nA sour experience created a ‘sweet’ solution<\/h1>\n
Breaking down barriers<\/h2>\n