This text is part of the special Nursing Profession notebook
During her first experience in a hospital environment, Odette Doyon had, as she likes to say, a “love at first sight” for cardiovascular care. Trainer, consultant and professor emeritus in nursing sciences at the University of Quebec at Trois-Rivières, she has just retired after 50 years of hard work in the field. Portrait of a woman who devoted herself body and soul to the modernization of the nursing profession and who, as such, received this year the Badge of Merit, the highest distinction awarded by the OIIQ.
“What motivated me was to ask myself the question: “Have I made a difference for someone today?” […] I always answered yes at the end of the day,” says Odette Doyon. After her first job at Notre-Dame Hospital, from 1973 to 1976, she set herself an ambitious goal: to join the Montreal Heart Institute (ICM) as an acute care nurse. “My passion is when life is threatened. […] What I’m going to do, every minute, is what keeps someone alive,” explains the retired nurse.
Odette Doyon ultimately spent 25 years of her career at the ICM. “That’s when I really became a nurse,” she says. In addition to working in most of the care units, she was also responsible for training the nursing staff. Among her many achievements at the Institute, she notes that of alleviating, at the end of the 1980s, a shortage of nurses. Odette Doyon then implemented a preceptorship program to support her students. Out of 60 candidates, the Institute ultimately kept 58: a record number for such a specialized hospital.
After a series of mandates, including that of deputy director of nursing, the specialist launched a new challenge in 1995. She then became a professor of acute care at the University of Quebec at Trois-Rivières (UQTR), the very first position of this kind in Quebec. “I understood that instead of training 50, 60 nurses at the Institute, I would have access to students from all over the province. I asked myself: “Do I have something to say to them, to convey to them?” Once again, the answer was yes,” says the expert.
The patient first
At UQTR, Odette Doyon then became department director and collaborated on a book on the clinical examination in nursing practice, deeming the existing works incomplete. “For nurses, it is not a diagnostic perspective, but a monitoring one. That means you have to be able to recognize clinical alerts and when a system is deteriorating,” she explains.
The professional has thus made clinical monitoring her hobby horse. Through her doctoral research project, she created a follow-up clinic to improve the quality of life of heart failure patients — a clinic which, around twenty years later, still exists. “The significant results of the project made it possible to develop this type of monitoring program in other provinces,” she adds with pride.
Since 2004, Odette Doyon has also been a legal consultant and has produced several expert reports on nursing supervision for deceased patients. Its goal: to learn from mistakes made to improve the overall quality of acute care. “The patient must come first. […] I have always applied this way of thinking about my ideas, both with my students and with my colleagues,” she emphasizes.
International advances
A pioneer in clinical surveillance in Quebec, Odette Doyon has also spread her expertise beyond the province. From 2011 to 2023, she served as a visiting professor at the University of Lausanne (UNIL), in Switzerland, where she enhanced the master’s program in nursing sciences. She also used her fifteen years of experience in clinical examination to develop training within two other renowned Swiss establishments. At the end of her mandate at UNIL, she designed and established, in just one year, a nurse practitioner program, drawing inspiration from models existing in other countries. “It’s certainly one of the best programs in the world,” says M.me Doyon.
All of these achievements earned her this year the Badge of Merit, the highest distinction awarded by the Order of Nurses of Quebec to an emeritus member of the profession for their entire career. In Odette Doyon’s eyes, there is still a long way to go for the public to understand the importance of the role of nurses. “23:30 hours a day, during an acute care hospitalization, the person who monitors, interprets vital signs and monitors side effects […], it’s the nurse. She is the one who is there and ensures the safety of the patient,” she summarizes.
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