From an early age, Karen Samson [BN/09] knew she wanted to help others.
During her childhood in Winnipeg’s Garden City neighbourhood, she recalls, her grandfather suffered a seizure. It’s one of her earliest memories of seeing health-care workers.
“I remember an ambulance coming. I was thinking, ‘What’s happening? We need to help him.’”
Samson joined the health-care ranks in 1988, after completing a registered nursing diploma at what was then Misericordia General Hospital.
Because nursing jobs in Winnipeg were scarce, she moved to Kenora, Ont., and for the next decade worked mostly in emergency and intensive care in Ontario and northern Manitoba. Her first experience with a dying patient solidified her passion for providing care.
“This man was all alone. His family weren’t going to make it in time, so I stayed with him. I was honoured to be that person beside him.”
Today, Samson is the executive director of health services and chief nursing officer at St. Boniface Hospital, overseeing all clinical and nursing programs at the facility.
She hadn’t always planned on moving into leadership, but was encouraged along the way.
When she and her husband returned to Winnipeg from Ontario in the late 1990s, she started at the Seven Oaks General Hospital emergency department. Her managers there knew she had been a clinical instructor in Ontario and encouraged her to continue on this path. That led her to complete a bachelor’s degree in nursing at UM.
“I was the first member of my family to go through university,” she remembers. “I had to balance my workload with having three children, but I knew the degree would help me as an educator.”
After moving into hospital management positions, she went on to earn a master’s degree in nursing from Athabasca University.
In 2021, Samson became director of the emergency program at St. Boniface Hospital, just as a massive expansion and modernization of the emergency department – slated for completion in 2025 – was getting underway.
She advocated for many changes to the department, including the addition of a comfortable end-of-life room for patients to spend their final hours with loved ones, away from the noise and commotion of the department, and individual rooms for the most acute patients.
“These rooms have windows to support and balance the patient’s sleep cycle, which in turn prevents confusion.”
Keeping the emergency department running during this construction project was a major challenge, Samson says.
“You have to make patients comfortable while there are buildings being demolished and concrete posts being pounded in. But it’s all for the greater good of our patients and community.”
In her current senior management role at St. Boniface Hospital, she is working to recruit and support new nurses while retaining the current workforce. This includes a mentorship program for newly hired nurses, supporting a new wellness co-ordinator, and promoting Indigenous and French language recruitment strategies.
The hospital recently hired a talent acquisition specialist who promotes health-care careers in high schools. Samson also believes in building strong relationships with nursing students in their senior practicum.
“We want to support those nurses who are graduating soon and keep them here in Manitoba,” she says.
BY ALAN MACKENZIE