The University of Windsor and Windsor Regional Hospital are exploring a potential partnership around a new health and innovation park on lands purchased for the future Windsor-Essex acute care hospital.

UWindsor president Rob Gordon is looking forward to the expanded opportunities the Health Innovation Park will bring to the region.

“Through the years, we have continued to build on the vital connections between our institutions,” he said. “Students, especially those at the Faculty of Science, School of Nursing, and the Schulich School of Medicine, have all benefited from our long-standing relationship through experiential learning — and we have also been exceptional partners in research, innovation and outreach including the WE-Spark Health Institute.”

The project will position Windsor-Essex as a leading region for education, training, and research in the health-care sector for years to come. The ambitious plans follow many years of discussion and exploration of opportunities to enhance regional health research capacity and strengthen the partnership between the University and hospital to benefit the community.

“Research and education has always been one of the main drivers behind the need for a new acute care hospital in the region,” said David Musyj, WRH president and CEO. “Windsor Regional Hospital looks forward to this planning work with the University of Windsor to advance this concept further. The relationships developed by WE-Spark Health Institute naturally transition into this exciting planning.”

The Health Innovation Park may include:

• dedicated space for collaborative research and training;
• expanded government and private sector health service providers and collaborations; and
• space for business to assist in research, from innovation through to commercialization, supporting new ventures and startup investors.

The Health Innovation Park could also include hotel space for short-term accommodations, residential housing for staff and students, a long-term care facility, a wellness centre, and professional medical office space for health-care providers.

Preliminary planning has discussed the creation of a “livable and vibrant” work area surrounding the new acute care hospital which will support healthy community living, and the development of open green space for trails.

Discussions with local partners will continue as plans for the new Windsor-Essex acute care hospital are developed, with plans to time the opening of the Health Innovation Park to coincide with that of the new hospital.

A new research project out of the University of Windsor aims to ensure nursing graduates have the extra psychological preparation they need to work in hospitals during health-care crises.

Flowing from interviews with local nurses during the pandemic, the project will yield a 10-week training program for senior nursing students. It will first be offered at the UWindsor Faculty of Nursing, then rolled out at the University of Ottawa and Queen’s University.

The pandemic has decimated the nursing profession, said psychology professor Dana Ménard, the lead researcher on the project. Dr. Ménard, fellow psychology professor Kendall Soucie, and nursing professors Laurie Freeman and Jody Ralph, conducted research during the pandemic that showed nurses leaving the profession in droves after suffering depression, burnout, anxiety, trauma, alcohol and substance abuse, and overall distress.

While many older nurses took early retirements, young nurses decided to start new careers.

“Young nurses have left the profession saying this is not what I signed up for,” said Ménard.

“The older nurses are retiring early and we’re losing the young nurses, too. We’re gutting the profession at both ends, so we have to do something.”

Ménard has received a $406,000 grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to develop the training program. It comes from special government funding to research the wider impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

For the project, Ménard has again teamed up with Drs. Soucie, Freeman, and Ralph, as well as Marian Luctkar-Flude from Queen’s University and Jane Tyerman from the University of Ottawa. UWindsor’s Erika Kustra, director of the Centre for Teaching and Learning, and Nick Baker, director of Open Learning, will lend their expertise to the program, as will Amanda McEwan and Debbie Rickeard, learning specialists in the nursing faculty.

The program will be called STRONG — short for Simulated Training to improve Resiliency Of Nursing Groups. It will be launched as a pilot project, with nursing students and nurses currently working in hospitals having input during the program’s development and delivery.

“The pandemic has shown us that new nurses, who are overwhelmingly female and young, may be at increased risk of negative health consequences due to work stress,” Ménard said.

The program will improve not only the well-being of new nurses, but the health-care system overall, she said.

“To preserve the safe, sustainable, and effective functioning of the Canadian health-care system over the next decade, it is crucial to retain a greater proportion of new nurses entering the workforce… This program will help lay the groundwork.”

—Sarah Sacheli

This spring, more than 650 students joined members of UWindsor’s Strategic Planning team during four consultation sessions on campus to have their say on the University’s next strategic plan. Student participation in the Aspire: Together for Tomorrow consultation sessions provided the team with more than 21,000 data points for analysis that will help guide the University’s future.

As a next step in the planning process, the group has launched a virtual engagement platform for students — with staff, faculty, and community webpages to follow later this month.

“Input from our students during the first phases of consultation were critical to developing the next steps in this strategic planning process,” said Erika Kustra, co-chair of the consultation and community engagement team for Aspire and director of the Centre for Teaching and Learning. “Some smaller, in-person events are being planned to focus on specific themes, but we are pleased to offer virtual engagement opportunities in case students weren’t able to join us in person.”

For more information and to engage, visit https://engageuwindsor.ca/aspire-strategic-planning.

More than 140 Windsor Essex Catholic District School Board high school students converged at the Faculty of Engineering to experience and learn about aerospace, industrial, and mechatronics engineering on Thursday, May 5.

The day was particularly momentous in that it was the first field trip the Faculty of Engineering outreach program has hosted in over two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions. In-person visits to high school classrooms resumed about three weeks ago.

“Although we did things virtually during the pandemic, just due to the nature of engineering, learning about it in-person with the opportunity to do hands-on activities is always more beneficial and provides a more enjoyable experience to those participating,” says Mike Konstantino, engineering outreach co-ordinator.

Mike St. Pierre, a teacher consultant at the Windsor Essex Catholic District School Board adds: “The students and teachers were thrilled to have the opportunity to finally visit the University of Windsor campus in-person. You could see the excitement in their eyes when they arrived.”

Students from Villanova, St. Anne, and Holy Names high schools engaged in activities and presentations throughout the day:

• Aerospace — an introduction to aerodynamics and aerospace engineering challenged teams to design their own mini-airplane wings. The design was then tested in a model wind tunnel specially constructed for the outreach program.
• Industrial — an intro to production flow methods challenged teams to optimize, test, and determine the best production method for building a product, robots made out of Lego bricks.
• Mechanical and electrical — an introduction to mechatronics challenged students to code a self-driving car using an open-source electronic prototyping platform enabling them to create interactive electronic objects.

“Today’s event was a fabulous opportunity for our STEM students to better understand the field of engineering,” says St. Pierre. “The interactions with faculty and grad students provided them with insight on what it would be like to continue their studies at the University of Windsor.

“The Centre for Engineering Innovation building is a world class research facility. I am always amazed when I come for visits.”

Konstantino says it was good to welcome the secondary school students back to the facility.

“The field trip also gave us an opportunity to showcase some of our newer hands-on activities highlighting different areas of engineering that we hadn’t been able to do yet because of the pandemic,” he says. “Industrial was done for the first time and aerospace is relatively new as well. I would say overall that the field trip day was a great success.”

Email Konstantino at mikek@uwindsor.ca for more information or to inquire about upcoming outreach programming.

—Gam Macasaet

UWindsor faculty or staff women can take a self-defence course worth $150 for free on Saturday and Sunday, May 21 and 22, thanks to the Office of Sexual Violence Prevention, Resistance, and Support.

The two-day program, Wen Do Women’s Self-Defence, offers easy-to-learn, easy-to-remember physical and verbal techniques in response to the most common assaults on girls and women: wrist and arm holds, choke and body holds, weapons defence, ground and bed defence, and gang and swarming situations.

Sessions run 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. both days in a campus space. Space is limited; sign up now.