Passing of Jennifer Kryworuchko, 2019 Alumni of Distinction
Kryworuchko devoted much of her work as a nursing researcher to studying the organization and delivery of health care services to optimize patient and family involvement in health decision making and to improve access to palliative care.
Her community-engaged scholarship — intended to influence practical changes in policy, system design and care delivery — focused on ensuring that seriously ill individuals, with their families and medical team, are engaged in shared decision-making about the end-of-life care they desire.
Kryworuchko earned her Bachelor of Science in Nursing at the University of Ottawa and became a Nursing Officer in the Canadian Armed Forces. While she was a military nurse, she earned a Critical Care Nursing Diploma at Algonquin College (Class of 1996). In an interview earlier this year, she called her time at Algonquin an important step along her educational path, which eventually included a Graduate Diploma in Health Services and Policy Research and PhD in Nursing, both completed at the U of O.
“I really appreciated my college courses,” she said. “They went into a lot of depth and helped me understand critical care in ICU in a way I hadn’t before. In many ways, my college experience impacted my whole career. It helped me be a better nurse at the bedside. It gave me greater confidence as a teacher and clinician. Taking those additional courses gave me an appetite for graduate studies and helped me become a better researcher. I have absolutely become a better teacher since my critical care courses. They helped me learn the nursing case knowledge that has turned out to be invaluable to my undergraduate nursing students.”
Read the In Memoriam published by Kryworuchko's employer, the University of British Columbia, here.Read her full Alumni of Distinction biography here.