Elaine Santa Mina will tell you she’s not a very good career planner: “Many nurses have a well-defined career trajectory, but that’s not been me.” However, for someone who has worked in nursing for over 46 years, and managed to “fall in love” with what she does, Santa Mina has had tremendously good luck, and an eerily good sense of intuition.

In 1969, she became a nurse because her sister was a teacher and her mom a secretary, making nursing– the only other real option for women at that time – “…the logical choice.”

My world exploded with knowledge. It just opened up doors for me that I never would have dreamt…possible. I had a sense of competence and knowledge and…I enjoyed working with patients.

The self-described shy and nervous teenager embarked on Toronto General Hospital’s two-year nursing program with a fair bit of trepidation. “I thought…I don’t know if I can do this…but then I almost instantly fell in love with it.” To be precise, she fell in love with learning. “My world exploded with knowledge. It just opened up doors for me that I never would have dreamt…possible. I had a sense of competence and knowledge and…I enjoyed working with patients.”

The breadth of knowledge was a constant enticement, she admits, so much so that just six years after graduating, she would make the riskiest decision of her career (considering many women were expected to work only a few years before getting married). She decided to find ways to juggle full-time work and part-time school for the next 28 years. While working full-time as a manager in acute care, Santa Mina somehow managed to get four degrees.

“I tell students today who are feeling overwhelmed and fearful that I do know what it [feels] like, and that the art of experience is to take it one step at a time…One day it really does add up.”

For Santa Mina, that day it all ‘added up’ for her, she graduated with a PhD from the University of Toronto with a focus on mental health. It was then she decided to leave the clinical side of nursing after four decades to join the academic world as a nursing professor. She began teaching statistics and research at Ryerson University’s Daphne Cockwell School of Nursing in 2005. Why the move?

“As much as social and political contexts have changed radically, many of our health-care concerns and issues and problems remain the same,” she says. “I felt it was time to step away (from clinical practice) and look at some issues from a more academic lens, to see if I could contribute to resolving problems by advancing knowledge and understanding of creative approaches and interventions.”

Shortly after the career shift, Santa Mina was approached by RNAO to help develop its suicide prevention best practice guideline (BPG). Although she didn’t know much about the guidelines, or RNAO’s expanding BPG program, she quickly jumped on board because it was a chance to focus on one of her passions – mental health. “It was quite intriguing,”she recalls.

Santa Mina quickly saw a way to bring BPGs into her teaching, creating simulated nursing data sets around two or three recommendations from the falls BPG. “It was an incredibly time-consuming and challenging way to bring the BPGs into the curriculum,” she admits, but the effort over the years (she’s now incorporated 15) has paid off. She exposes hundreds of nursing students to various guidelines every semester.

While she doesn’t have any way of measuring the impact of this on students’ future practice, Santa Mina says she’s hoping that by becoming an academic BPSO (they were accepted as a pre-designate in April), Ryerson will find a way to advance knowledge of the BPG’s outcomes. She and three colleagues are coming together as BPSO co-leads, and their first step is to conduct a knowledge-gap analysis, first with students, and then with the program.

Santa Mina is also an active member of the Guideline Implementation Network (GIN) (as is RNAO), which is an international network that focuses specifically on guidelines. She believes nurses need to be at the international table when discussions of best practices are happening.

 “I have no regrets,” she says as she looks back on how her career’s unfolded. In fact, she thinks it has been pretty remarkable for someone who did not plot a professional destiny. She wants to be known, first, as a constant learner, a pursuit that has already allowed her to achieve the second item on her legacy wish list: “I want to make a difference in people’s lives.”