After a storied career in nursing, prof Barbara Chyzzy uses new technology to bring community support to young mothers
Since beginning her career in 1989 as a registered nurse in Winnipeg, Barbara Chyzzy has worked around the world. Within Canada, her nursing practice spanned neurosurgical units, intensive care and home care settings. Overseas, her work included primary care in rural clinics in Vietnam and the Canadian Embassy in Korea as well as emergency medical evacuations internationally. Eventually, her path led her to academia where she joined Ryerson as a professor at the Daphne Cockwell School of Nursing in January 2020.
“Nursing is the kind of career where you never get bored,” says Chyzzy “There are so many options that you can always pursue your passion. I’ve had a very varied career and every one of my roles has been fascinating. These roles, and my overseas work, opened my eyes to the need for people to be nursing leaders in Canada and I wanted to be a part of that. I had a solid practice background that led me to academia.”
In her PhD research, Chyzzy brought technology and life together to build community support for young mothers. Having noticed a higher level of postpartum depression in teen moms, and corresponding health outcomes for children, Chyzzy’s research aims to look for answers. Currently, she is planning a meta-analysis to find a better sense of the scope of mental health challenges for young mothers. “There are many studies that look at this and all have somewhat different conclusions on the size of the problem, but we seem to see a 38% prevalence of symptoms of postpartum depression in younger moms compared to 13% in adult mothers. So I am going back and looking at a lot of data to analyze and standardize this.”
Her PhD work looked at how peer support might make a difference. “I work with a network of 32 agencies that support young moms in Toronto. For my research project, I trained young moms who had been parenting for at least six months as peer mentors and then paired them with new young moms via mobile phone-based peer support app. There was a high retention rate for participants in the study and I learned that a little support can go a long way. I am amazed at the resiliency young mothers show in response to the many challenges they face; and how various supports like peer support and advocacy—even transit tokens—can lead to improved outcomes for them and their child.”
“Nursing is a great career if you are a person who wants to work with people. We aren’t the ones looking through a microscope. If you are social and want to work with people while also understanding the science of things, you can really impact a person’s quality of life in this career. From geriatrics to reproductive care, it’s the smallest things that sometimes have the biggest impact on someone’s life. That connection a nurse has with a patient will stay with them for a long time.”