Knowledge, Innovation and Care: Community Nursing in Edmonton
Adam Henley ’05, reflects on their time at Trent and their journey to starting their own clinical service organization
In 2009, Adam Henley ‘05 (Champlain College) walked across the graduation stage at Trent University and descended those podium steps as one of the latest graduates from the Trent/Fleming School of Nursing.
Thirteen years later, Adam is the founder and clinical lead at Consortia Care – a clinical service organization with a dedication to innovation and care for those in need of home care within Edmonton, Alberta, and credits Trent for helping prepare them to lead their own organization.
Innovation in the changing healthcare landscape
Adam’s work with Consortia Care reflects his passion for building more comprehensive care services, and he is using his nursing background to expand the boundaries of community care. Consortia Care innovations include developing psychotherapeutic supports for trauma-informed care, and virtual care and Edmonton’s first comprehensive home care option for after-hours brain injury and post-stroke care.
He remains passionate about growing the scope of community nursing and is actively involved in projects and initiatives to advance the role of nursing in Canada. One of these areas is looking at how nurses can shape symptoms over time, by integrating emerging perspectives on interoception and consciousness from the field of health psychology.
“There's no other profession, no other discipline that is as well positioned to investigate these topics than a nurse, because a nurse receives continuous qualitative data from our patients as we work with these syndromes. We talk to people living with symptoms,” says Adam. “I think that's a challenge as well an opportunity for nursing as we move into things like artificial intelligence, and we try to define what exactly a nurse's intuition is.”
While these are still big ideas, community care will progress and advance to new limits because of people like Adam.
The journey from Trent to Consortia Care
Adam spent their years at Trent developing a reputation for community involvement; he was a member of the Trent Central Students Association (TCSA), the Trent Pride Committee, Trent Students Offering Support (SOS), and the Advancement Committee of the Trent Board of Governors.
He said that these experiences helped prepare them for a future leadership role but adds that his path to founding Consortia Care began in the classrooms at Trent.
In what Adam calls a “very Trent way”, his courses spent significant time looking at the social and natural sciences that would be outside the scope of a typical nursing education.
“My microbiology course is one example. We didn't just take a very linear focus on gram positive and negative bacteria,” says Adam. “We probably spent too much time talking about fungus, but that was actually very helpful as an oncology nurse when I graduated.”
Things like genomics, pharmacology and the human response to disease, and even how to treat different fungi all informed the work that Adam now finds themselves doing.
“Trent brings this flavor of discovery and this tremendous respect for the basic sciences within health care. Trent shows you the value of discovery in health care,” says Adam. “The questions that Trent instilled in me include: What is the knowledge of nursing? What are the areas that we don't know about? Why do we do things a certain way? And, are there areas outside of nursing to discover in that respect? As it turns out, there's a whole lot of areas that are undiscovered in the area of symptom management.”