Simulation Teaching Fellows

Georgina Bagstad has taught nursing students in the classroom and clinical setting for 28 years with 23 of those years at the University of Calgary. As a sim fellow, she is interested integrating selected first year undergraduate nursing students and nursing alumni mentors in nursing education through a program promoting students and alumni as actors during simulation scenarios.

The purpose of the project is two-fold: 1) Develop first year nursing students and nursing alumni as actors in simulation scenarios to enrich nursing education by giving higher level nursing students the opportunity to practice communication and assessment skills in preparation for their experience with patients in the clinical environment. 2) Assess the advantages of teaching improv skills and using nursing alumni as mentors for the selected first-year nursing students to enhance their critical thinking and reasoning skills and promote quick thinking when they advance through the nursing program.

Carla Ferreira is an instructor (tenure-track) in the Faculty of Nursing. She has been teaching undergraduate nursing students since 2007. She received her Master’s in Nursing degree with a focus on nursing education at the University of Victoria.

Carla is also a Certified Healthcare Simulation Educator (CHSE) and believes that her knowledge and experience of using simulation in teaching undergraduate nursing students helped in exploring her identity as a nurse educator.

The focus of her simulation fellowship project, Peer Coaching for Faculty Development, involves the use of simulation-based learning experiences and theories that underpin simulation as a way to inform one’s approach to teaching and learning to improve student/teacher engagement in the education process.

Dave Patterson graduated from the University of Calgary in 2008 with a Bachelor of Nursing degree and completed his Masters of Nursing degree in December of 2018, with a focus on clinical simulation.

Patterson is an Instructor with the University of Calgary's Faculty of Nursing, specializing in the clinical education of undergraduate students. As an active Community Health Educator for Alberta Health Services' Perinatal Education Program and a former Level II NICU Nurse, he works with parents and fathers' transitioning to their new role. 

Patterson's clinical and scholarly interests lie in undergraduate paediatric nursing education, the use of literature to assist undergraduate nursing students develop empathy for the older adult population, and the use of simulation as an adjunct to clinical practice within specialty nursing practices.

During his time as a Simulation Fellow, Dave will be focusing on simulation scenario evaluation, as well as creating a simulation repository for the use of all Faculty of Nursing members.

Tammy Hnatyshyn has been a Registered Nurse for more than 20 years. She has worked as a staff nurse in the areas of respiratory medicine, post-partum, ante-partum, labor and delivery and childbirth education.

Her areas of interest are maternal child nursing and clinical learning. Expertise as a nursing instructor has been achieved through many years of teaching student nurses in acute care and an MN degree with a teaching focus.

Scholarship interests include Constructivist and Transformative Learning in nursing education, and the role of instructor support in clinical learning.

Kimberly Shapkin is a Nurse Practitioner and an instructor (tenure track) in the Faculty of Nursing, currently teaching in the Nurse Practitioner program. Kimberly’s background is focused on caring for medically complex older adults with an interest in palliative care and dementia.

As a Simulation Fellow Kimberly has worked to integrate the use of simulation education into the NP program, focusing her project on developing high fidelity simulation scenarios for NP students.

Kimberly is currently towards her PhD in Nursing at the University of Victoria.

The Simulation Fellowship is an opportunity to reconnect with working in the simulation area and integrating simulation into current teaching and learning experiences for students.

As a Sim Fellow, Ruth has reconfigured the Term 5 and 6 on-campus clinical laboratory guides with the aim of facilitating clinical imagination; Re-Designing Lab for Clinical Imagination. As Benner et al (2010) shares, on-campus lab practice can often focus exclusively on the psychomotor skills with little attention to the critical thinking necessary to apply these skills to practice and the patient situation.

Modifying the clinical labs into a three-station format to include “mini-scenarios” using manikins is a means to increase awareness of potential patient adult and pediatric situations requiring critical thinking around these psychomotor skills. Simulation of various levels of fidelity can be an instructional strategy to support student connection of theory and on-campus learning to the real-life clinical environment.

As a senior instructor with the faculty involved with the various terms in the program, Ruth aims to focus on supporting students to developing their nursing practice with the necessary critical thinking.

She has previous simulation training and experience prior to moving into other areas of teaching in the Faculty of Nursing.

Krista came to the simulation team with a background in paediatric and neonatal critical care nursing. As a simulation fellow at UCalgary Nursing, she worked on integrating pediatric VSim (virtual simulation) cases into the curriculum.

The hybrid approach of combining VSim with hands-on learning helps to reinforce the learning objectives of the simulation experience through repetition in a safe and supportive environment.

She has also adapted the paediatric lab and simulation guides to have more hands-on learning for students.

Krista enjoys the simulation lab’s role of providing scaffolding for students to develop in the Zone of Proximal Development.

She is currently working on her PhD in Epidemiology at the University of Calgary's Community Health Sciences, studying quality care metrics in the paediatric ICU.