In October, Turner was named the 2022 “Simulation Star of the Year” by Sentinel U, a Connecticut-based company that specializes in web-based simulation education technology solutions for nursing schools and hospital systems. This is the company’s second-annual award recognizing the “most influential and impactful nurse educator” in the U.S. and Canada.

She was also recently named runner-up for the “Emerging Leader in Nursing and Midwifery Education” Award at the Nurse Education Today and Nurse Education in Practice NETNEP International Nurse Education Conference in Barcelona, Spain. Originally she was scheduled to receive a certificate in 2020, but the conference was delayed due to COVID-19. College of Nursing dean Dr. Netha Dyck accepted it on her behalf in October.

Simulation was not part of the UM nursing curriculum when Turner graduated with a bachelor of nursing in 2005. Until she joined the faculty in 2014, she didn’t even know it was an option. But once she was exposed to it, she was excited about the possibilities.

“I just love the creativity component of simulation and the challenge of creating these realistic experiences for students before they go into a clinical environment,” she said.

Turner worked closely with Dr. Nicole Harder, Mindermar professor in human simulation in the Rady Faculty of Health Sciences, to develop the college’s simulation program, which includes the use of life-like manikins in a simulated hospital setting and, as of this year, virtual reality simulations.

The idea is to create common experiences in clinical settings where students learn from them safely before going into a real clinical placement.

“Instead of just throwing the student into an experience where they don’t know how to approach it and might make a mistake, they can do it in a simulation and then step back and really break down the experience and learn from it,” Turner said.

“It allows them to think and apply the knowledge they’ve learned to a clinical experience.”

Sufia Turner with her “Simulation Star of the Year” award.

In 2015, Turner supported Harder, also associate dean, undergraduate programs in the College of Nursing, with the implementation of a provincial pilot project that led to the College of Registered Nurses of Manitoba supporting the replacement of 25 per cent of clinical practice with simulation.

“The pilot project was supported by all the deans of nursing programs provincially, and in 2020, due to the global pandemic, was increased to 50 per cent.  Currently, most nursing programs in the province include simulation as part of their clinical practice courses,” Harder said.

Turner also has a master’s degree in nursing from UM that she received in 2020. Her degree is focused on nursing education and her thesis was on the perceptions of psychological safety in simulation from the perspective of undergraduate nursing students.

“Psychological safety means that someone can go into a situation, make a mistake and not get judged or face any major consequences from it. To know that when a mistake is made, a student can take a step back and with an experienced facilitator, look at all angles of that mistake and talk about how the mistake occurred, how it can be prevented and then most importantly, how we can learn from it,” Turner said.

Harder congratulated Turner for the award, noting her dedication to simulation education will benefit the College of Nursing as it expands its program next year.

“We are adding an additional 120 students annually to our nursing program. This will include expanding our simulation program as well, and in order to continue to provide quality experiential learning experiences for our students, we need educators like Sufia to develop and implement these learning experiences,” Harder said. 

Turner has also been involved in the college’s new immersive virtual reality (VR) simulation. 

CanU is a charitable organization that empowers Winnipeg youth from low socio-economic backgrounds to explore various careers in programs designed and led by post-secondary student volunteers who are honing their leadership and community service skills. The Inspire program is targeted at students in Grades 5 – 6, while the Explore program is for those in Grades 7 – 8.

The College of Nursing has been working with the organization since 2014, usually bringing students on campus for demonstrations and hands-on workshops to learn skills such as wound care, vital signs, moving and transferring patients with wheelchairs or crutches, and caring for infants.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the College of Nursing team led by third-and fourth-year nursing students Mikaela Canda and Stephan Miller had to find an innovative way to interact with students in a virtual environment during sessions scheduled for November and January.

“We still need to teach kids about nursing and show them how fun it can be and how fulfilling it is. I want to inspire them to go into the program, especially in this time when there is a great demand for nurses,” Canda said.

Mikaela Canda puts a bandage on her “patient” in a video demo.

In September, Canda and Miller met with the College of Nursing faculty advisor Sufia Turner to brainstorm alternatives, deciding on interactive workbooks that could be done with students over video conferences, and pre-recorded video demonstrations that showcase the skills they would normally perform in an interactive setting.

Canda and Miller recruited a team of 10 volunteers to help write and design the workbooks, provide demonstrations and record and edit the videos.

“We thought, especially with the younger kids, we can’t just give them a book with a bunch of words and pictures and expect them to be engaged, so we tried to make it as interactive as possible,” Miller said.

The video for Grades 5 – 6 students shows how to do medication calculations, proper hand hygiene, bedside safety checks, vital signs and simple wound care, as well as a demonstration on lung sounds, using sound effects to show what to listen for with a stethoscope.

The lung sounds demo is also featured in the video for Grades 7 – 8, along with sections on intramuscular injection, gauze roll application and pain assessment.

Canda and Miller said organizing volunteers for a completely new way of delivering the material was their biggest challenge.

“It was difficult to split the workload equally between each volunteer, but there were some advantages to working in an online format, given all the resources we have gotten used to this past year, like Zoom and Google Docs,” Miller said.

Turner said the response from CanU, teachers and students was overwhelmingly positive. Depending on how things go with COVID over the next few months, the resources could be used again next fall.

“In the face of a pandemic, these nursing students showed so much resiliency, strength and creativity. I’m very impressed at how they were able to adapt so well and create this amazing product for these young CanU students,” Turner said.