Margaret Purden

Scientific Director, Centre for Nursing Research, Jewish General Hospital.

Project Director, Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research, Jewish General Hospital.

Associate Professor, Assistant Director Ingram School of Nursing, McGill University.

Interprofessional Education and Practice

Margaret Purden has been the Scientific Director of the Centre for Nursing Research since 1999. Dr. Purden is also the Director of the Office of Interprofessional Education at McGill University's Faculty of Medicine (2016 - present), an Associate Professor at the Ingram School of Nursing, McGill University, and a Senior Investigator at the Jewish General Hospital's Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research (LDI).

She has conducted considerable work in the growing areas of Interprofessional Education (IPE) and Interprofessional Practice (IPP). Between 2013 and 2019, she and her team established the Office of Interprofessional Education with significant infrastructure support from the Faculty of Medicine to promote the advancement of interprofessional education and scholarly work. The program now delivers the IPE curriculum to over 1,800 students each year with the involvement of approximately 160 academic and clinical faculty. Previously, between 2005 and 2008, she co-led a 1.3 million dollar project funded by Health Canada titled The McGill Educational Initiative on Interprofessional Collaboration: Partnerships for Patient and Family-Centred Practice. In addition to numerous presentations at national and international conferences, her published work in the fields of IPE and IPP includes a systematic review of IPE for collaborative patient-centered practice completed for Health Canada and articles in the Journal of Interprofessional Care.

She is a member of the Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada (AFMC)'s Interprofessional Education Working Group and of the Canadian Interprofessional Health Collaborative. As a former co-chair of the Canadian Association of Schools in Nursing (CASN)'s Graduate Education Committee, she was instrumental in developing the national standards for masters' and doctoral nursing programs. She is a member of the Nursing Collaborative initiative at the JGH that developed and implemented the Leadership-In-Action Program in Nursing (LEAP-IN). The Jewish General Hospital honoured her accomplishments with a Distinguished Service Award for the Development of an Outstanding Nursing Research Program. In 2011 she became an inductee of the Faculty Honour List for Educational Excellence in the Faculty of Medicine and was the recipient of the McGill Medicine Alumni Global Award of Merit in 2018.

Her current research interests reflect her commitment to advancing the quality of care in the health care context. This work includes an intervention study to manage pain in collaboration in the ICU, observational research to advance our understanding of nursing handoffs with patients at risk of deterioration, and a qualitative investigation to explore patients’, families’ and health care providers’ perceptions of ICU care during the COVID pandemic.

Current Research Projects

Gélinas, C.,Laporta, D., Amaral, A., Bernard, F., Bérubé, M., Burry, L., Charbonney, E., Choinière, M., Dubé, J. N., Houle, J., Lavoie-Tremblay, M., Milhomme, D., Morin, S., Perreault, M., Purden, M., Rochefort, C., Rose, L., Scales, D., Thiffault, N., Tousignant-Laflamme, Y., Williamson, D. et al. Managing Pain In Collaboration in the ICU (MPIC-ICU): Impact on clinical practices and patient outcomes. Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) – Project Grant. 2020-2024

Selected Publications and Papers

Lavoie, P., Clarke, S. P., Clausen, C., Purden, M., Emed, J., Cosencova, L., & Frunchak, V. (2020). Nursing handoffs and clinical judgments regarding patient risk of deterioration: A mixed-methods study. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 29(19-20), 3790-3801.  https://doi.org/10.1111/jocn.15409 

Lavoie, P., Clarke, S. P., Clausen, C., Purden, M., Emed, J., Mailhot, T., Fontaine, G., & Frunchak, V. (2020). Nurses’ judgments of patient risk of deterioration at change-of-shift handoff: Agreement between nurses and comparison with early warning scores. Heart & Lung, 49(4), 420-425.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hrtlng.2020.02.037 

Clausen, C., Emed, J., Frunchak, V., Purden, M., & Bruno, F. (2019). Toward resilient nurse leaders: The Leadership-in-Action Program in nursing. Nursing Leadership, 32(3), 40-56.  https://doi.org/10.12927/cjnl.2019.25973 

Kayser, J.W., Cossette, S., Côté, J., Tanguay, J-F., Tremblay, J-F., Diodati, J.G., Bourbonnais, A., Purden, M., Juneau,M., Terrier J., Dupuis, J., Maheu-Cadotte, M-A., & Cournoyer, D. (2019). A webbased tailored nursing intervention (TAVIE en m@rche) aimed at increasing walking after an acute coronary syndrome: Multicentre randomized trial. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 75(11), 2727-2741. https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.14119 

Alfaro, P., Di Criscio, V., Larouche, S., Purden, M., & Dubrovsky, AS. (2019). Near peer learning to facilitate nursing students' first medical surgical clinical experience. Quality Advancement in Nursing Education, 5(1), 3.  https://doi.org/10.17483/2368-6669.1170

Lavoie, P., Clarke, S., Clausen, C., Purden, M., Emed, J., Mailhot, T., Frunchak, V.  (2018). Acceptability and feasibility of recruitment and data collection in a field study of hospital nurses’ handoffs using mobile devices. Pilot and Feasibility Studies, 4(1), 163. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40814-018-0353-x 

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