https://www.infirmiere-canadienne.com/blogs/ic-contenu/2025/06/20/judy-duchscher-preparer-lavenir-soins-infirmiers
Judy Duchscher pursued initiative knowing she ‘might have a chance of saving someone else’s life down the road’
By Laura Eggertson
June 23, 2025
In this video, filmed in 2004 by Patients for Patient Safety Canada (formerly the Canadian Patient Safety Institute), Nursing The Future founder and CEO Judy Duchscher shares her story about the treatment her father received while in hospital. “I remember standing over his bedside toward the end … I needed to tell his story and I needed to be able to change something about the system that would ensure that this didn’t happen to somebody else.” She started Nursing The Future after he died.
The realization that new graduates and early career nurses urgently needed extra support struck Judy Duchscher over 25 years ago, as she sat beside her father’s hospital bedside, witnessing the errors and misjudgments she believes led to his death.
It was 2004, and Victor Boychuk, Duchscher’s father, was in a Regina hospital following surgery to treat bowel cancer.
Duchscher, an experienced critical care nurse, educator, and cardiothoracic transplant program specialist, was researching the experiences of nursing graduates transitioning into hospital jobs for her PhD when her father was admitted to hospital.
As she spent hours every day stationed at his side, she watched new nurses struggle with “transition shock.” It was the same stressor that new nurses were describing to her during her research, and it was affecting the care her dad was receiving. Those stresses contributed to her father’s death, Duchscher says.
Her father’s experience is the reason Duchscher founded Nursing The FutureTM. This national non-profit organization is dedicated to creating a professional nursing and health-care culture that supports newly practising nurses and builds their leadership capacity.
“I watched my father fall through the cracks in the health-care system,’’ says Duchscher, a recently retired associate professor at Thompson Rivers University who continues her program of research with newly graduated nurses and leads Nursing The FutureTM.
Duchscher’s father’s ordeal began, in part, because he was weak and frail following a stroke that had occurred eight years before. This made him unable to withstand the bowel cancer surgery, Duchscher says.
Nurses were ignored
Despite her own misgivings about the operation’s success, her father opted to have it. Although he survived the surgery, he remained wretchedly ill, vomiting for the entire seven weeks between his surgery and his death.
Nurses staffing her father’s floor were too busy or, in the case of new graduates, did not have the experience to spot the problems that were emerging, she says.
Duchscher says she watched as new graduates struggled to properly assess and compassionately respond to her father’s care needs. “My father’s potassium was totally off the charts but nobody thought to take the potassium out of his intravenous fluid” she remembers.
Nurses who did see that Boychuk’s condition was deteriorating and tried to warn the physician were ignored, Duchscher says.
Although her father did not have enough strength to even get out of bed, his surgeon ordered hospital staff to walk him up and down the hallway, and they complied. His weakness and subsequent hesitancy to walk resulted in staff labelling him uncooperative, Duchscher says.
One day, she arrived to find her father being walked through the hospital’s corridors, with staff clearly unaware of the fact that he was having a heart attack.
“He’s short of breath. His colour is poor. But he is trying so hard,” she says. “He didn’t want them to think he wasn’t trying.”
Taking his pulse, Duchscher found it irregular. She realized his heart was in an abnormal rhythm — he was in atrial fibrillation.
“There are nurses, there’s a respiratory therapist with him — and nobody notices? Why? Because you were sure that he was just being difficult,” she says.
“Nobody was paying attention to him. The nurses were too busy doing things that they shouldn’t have to do, like moving beds around the unit to accommodate incoming admissions, or didn’t feel confident enough to do, as in the case of the new graduate prompted to challenge inappropriate clinical directives coming from the physician.”
Duchscher and the nurses got her father back to bed and confirmed he was, indeed, suffering a heart attack. Within 48 hours, he was comatose. After a week of failed interventions, Duchscher and her family made the unthinkable decision to discontinue therapy, and Victor Boychuk died.
“I remember as he was dying I swore I would never go into another hospital. I was so angry and so disappointed in my own profession,” she says. It was at this point that she started questioning what supports were available for new graduates. “I realized that the new graduates were the key to the change we needed to see in how nurses practise.”
The same year her father died, Duchscher started Nursing The FutureTM.
“I put all my energy into my students and the new nurses they had become,” she says.
Her goal was to support nurses, particularly new graduates, and to give them the confidence they needed to make change within the health-care system. They needed the mentorship and support of their more senior nursing colleagues.
Duchscher wanted to remind new nurses to hold on to their values and standards. Her mission was to convince health-care leaders and administrators to nurture those graduates and help them acquire the expert mentorship they need to succeed.
High nursing losses
“If I could find a way to do that, I might have a chance of saving someone else’s life down the road, when I couldn’t save my father’s,” Duchscher told herself.
Research indicates that between 18 and 30 per cent of newly graduated nurses leave their jobs, or quit the profession altogether, during their first year of employment as a nurse. The rate is even higher in their second year, when 37 to 57 per cent of new graduates leave.
Transition shock — Duchscher’s field of expertise — is one of the major reasons the nursing profession loses new nurses. But the difficult experiences they encounter often go beyond adjusting to the realities of nursing jobs that differ from what they learn about in school.
“It’s an intersection of the type of graduate we are getting now and the environment,” Duchscher says.
Millennial and Gen Z nurses are joining the workforce in a world that is uncertain, highly technological, and where the dynamic pace of change is unprecedented. If they choose acute care, they’re also entering over-crowded, understaffed, and overwhelmed hospitals.
“If you don’t stay on top of things and if you aren’t able to flex with everything, then you truly get left behind,” Duchscher says. “The new world of the nursing graduate is unsettling and changing so often that the graduates can’t wrap their heads around things before they have changed again. The stability, consistency, familiarity and predictability that new nurses need to integrate all the new knowledge they are being exposed to is being constantly disrupted. When you factor in the tumultuous nature of the world today, you can understand why they leave — they are seeking stability and support and in its absence they will simply look elsewhere.”
The global pandemic also contributed to nurses’ experiences of burnout and moral distress, resulting in the loss of many mid- and senior-career nurses.
“With so many experienced nurses leaving the profession, we’ve lost a lot of nursing’s intellectual capital. Without the knowledge transfer that used to happen naturally as senior nurses shared their experiences with more junior ones, new graduates are less able to develop clinically and professionally, she says.”
“If we continue to lose our senior nurses and don’t provide these graduates with the support and stability they are looking for — even if they stay up to five years and then leave — that’s a travesty. Talk about a patient safety issue,” she says.
Nursing The Future aims to turn this trend around, by offering educational and professional workplace support strategies and resources for both new nurses and all those who work alongside them. The organization also works with nursing schools and employers to ensure they direct their new graduates to Nursing The Future.
“I want to empower these new nurses to hang on to what they have learned, to be advocates and to speak up,” she says. “They need to be confident in order to speak up. The fact that they come into their professional world and are not able to practise to the standard they were educated to expect is demoralizing. This kind of culture produces nurses who feel unable to speak up.”
The Stormchaser initiative is one of Nursing The Future’s endeavours, which she hopes to pilot in the next year. To do that, Duchscher requires sustainable financial support from the nursing and health-care community.
“Funding for grassroots efforts like this are always challenging to secure,” she says, but explains that these programs deal with the issues closest to the delivery of care.
Under the Stormchaser Certification Program, nurses who have been practising for at least a year would be trained to recognize and then mitigate the effects of transition stress on new graduates and could help the new nurses deal with conflict and chaos.
Bolster support
Ideally, hospitals or other health-care institutions would pay to have the Stormchasers trained and would then make them available as a resource for any new graduates who are struggling, Duchscher says.
“The Stormchaser would be connected with that graduate and would help them move through those challenges, acting as a mediator between the unit, the manager, the educator, and the graduate,” Duchscher envisions.
The Stormchasers would work with managers and senior nurses to help them determine how to intervene to smooth the transition process and resolve any systemic issues.
Better-supported new graduates would become Stormchasers in turn, leading to units full of nurses who understand transition shock and can knowledgably support beginning nurses, Duchscher says.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, health-care policy-makers, hospital administrators and managers have been paying more attention to transition experiences for new nurses, she notes.
She highlights the trend toward ‘clinical mentorship’ initiatives and hopes more provinces and health-care institutions will adopt this strategy of hiring mid- and senior-career nurses to serve as mentors. These nurses are not required to take a patient caseload but are simply there to guide, coach and support new and early career nurses.
Having recently spent a month working with the University of South Australia on optimizing their transition supports, Duchscher praised their ‘Wisdom at Work’ program, which hires retired nurses as mentors. (For more information, contact Marion Eckert, Director of the Rosemary Bryant AO Research Centre, by email at marion.eckert@unisa.edu.au.)
“They support new nurses and early-career nurses, and they serve as those clinical care experts, which is what we’re missing,” Duchscher says.
When she is not developing creative ways to support and mentor new nurses, Duchscher applies that energy to her health and fitness, spending time with her husband, Glen Morris, taking dance and yoga classes, and socializing with friends.
No matter what she is doing in her career, Duchscher says, her passion for teaching will always be a part of it — a pursuit she hopes would have made her father, a high school chemistry and physics teacher, proud.
Her research and her organization are both making a difference, Duchscher believes. She hopes the lasting impact will be that new nursing graduates receive the help and the resources they need to embrace a lasting career in health care.
Nursing The Future is supported by the Canadian Nurses Foundation and the Canadian Nurses Association, giving Duchscher high hopes for the future.
“Most educators and new graduate supporters in workplaces today know about Nursing The Future and they know to direct the graduates there,” Duchscher says. “It’s getting better.”
Laura Eggertson is a freelance journalist based in Wolfville, N.S.
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