By Jonathan Forani, Toronto Star, May 7, 2015
Joyce Rankin, who with her team heal the ailments of homelessness, received an honourable mention in this year’s Nightingale Awards
Joyce Rankin always knew she’d be a nurse. But what she didn’t know was that she’d be as much a public advocate for her clients as a caregiver.
“It’s not just about having a cut finger,” says Rankin, a 2015 Nightingale Award honourable mention.
Nurses everywhere ask: are they providing the proper care to a client? Are their health needs met? But when a man with a developmental delay walked into the Street Health Community Nursing Foundation clinic, on Dundas Street East, in Toronto this past April – clothes too big, shoes too small – there was more to be done than ask about his physical health.
He told them that he was sent to Street Health, where Rankin is manager, because “there’s something with my money.” Now, Rankin and her team are working with the man to figure out what his needs are. They may draft a letter to the bank for him, or he may need someone to join him there to sort out his finances, Rankin suggests.
None of it is typical “nursing,” but it is typical at Street Health. This is the type of community and personal advocacy the organization does, she says.
And Rankin goes even further. The 49-year-old advocates on a bigger-picture level she couldn’t have anticipated early in her career. This March, she made a deputation at a Toronto City Hall committee meeting about the lack of shelter space in the city.
“It’s not just the individual, it’s the health of the community. If the community is healthy then the actual individual members of the population are healthy as well,” she says.
“Make no mistake, a shelter is not a home. But until we actually get enough affordable and supportive housing, we need to make sure we have enough shelter space.”
At Street Health, advocating for communities – systemic advocacy, she calls it – is at the heart of nursing. Rankin has seen firsthand the need for shelter beds and has made advocating for more a priority.
Outside of her full-time work with Street Health and part-time work at St. Michael’s Hospital, Rankin also runs the volunteerbased Out of the Cold program at Yorkminster Park Baptist Church, near Yonge St. and St. Clair Ave. It’s one of more than a dozen locations in the city where Toronto’s homeless people can find safe refuge and emergency shelter from mid-November to mid-April each year.
Still, during this past winter season in the GTA, there were four homeless deaths in the city.
“It is shameful that, in a country as wealthy as ours, someone can freeze to death in a bus shelter,” she says. “The fact that the city says that we have enough shelter space is quite concerning, because if we did, we wouldn’t have a need for the Out of the Cold programs.”
Those volunteer-run programs are now over until November, leaving Rankin wondering: What are the plans? What will the city do for those people who are still sleeping rough?
“It’s a challenge for me, because our role in health care is to support people, but we’re really letting the city off the hook with running the Out of the Cold programs,” she says. Where the city fails to step in, nurses such as Rankin and her team at Street Health step up.
And she’s investing in the next generation of nurses, too, as an instructor at the joint nursing program between George Brown College, Ryerson University and Centennial College. She tells her students that they’re entering the greatest career ever.
“I have the best of both worlds,” says Rankin of teaching and working in the field. “That’s the beauty of nursing – you can just do so much with it. I love to share my passion with the students.”
With some luck, one of Rankin’s students may land a profile in the Toronto Star for the Nightingale Awards before they’ve hit 30 years in the field, too.
“Joyce is remarkable because she really is a kind of embodiment of all the best about nursing,” says Kapri Rabin, executive director at Street Health and the colleague who nominated Rankin. “She’s very passionate about the field.”
When the team heard the news of Rankin’s honourable mention in the annual awards, they were astounded – and thrilled.
“I could hardly breathe, I was just so flabbergasted,” says Rankin. “I’ve had so many blessings in this career.”
