LAKELAND - After a long 12-hour shift at a family medicine unit located in the University of Alberta Hospital, Lisa Boykiw, a Smoky Lake local, retires to a family member's home in Edmonton while she completes her final placement to become a Licensed Practical Nurse (LPN).
Soon Boykiw, a graduating student of the Portage College LPN program, will no longer need to live and travel between the city and her hometown. After leaving her town to complete the majority of her program, she is excited for when she will no longer have to wait for her batch of days off to return home to her family in Northern Alberta, she says.
At 47-years-old, Boykiw is not your typical nursing student, she is a business owner, a mother of three teenagers, a caregiver and most recently she is a Governor General’s Collegiate Bronze Medal Award winner after she received a perfect 4.0 in her Practical Nurse Diploma at Portage College.
The Governor General’s Academic Medals are awarded to the student graduating from a post-secondary institution with the highest average. The Collegiate Bronze Medal is specifically awarded to post-secondary students for their outstanding scholastic achievements. Boykiw’s grades surpassed not only her LPN classmates but the entire Portage College student body during the 2021 academic year.
It is an achievement she is very proud of. Boykiw’s family are also proudly cheering on their busy award-winner.
“They feel a part of it because they helped me succeed to do that,” she told Lakeland Today.
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However, receiving the award is not the part of her journey she is most interested in sharing. It is the desire for people to believe in their own capabilities in pursuing their goals that she hopes to highlight through her efforts.
“A lot of people think, ‘Oh, I can’t, I am too busy or I am too old.’ I would like to say, you’re not. Look what you can do. You might not get the Governor General’s Award, but who is to say you can’t set a goal and accomplish that goal,” she said.
Filling a need
Three years ago, after numerous conversations with friends and family discussing the healthcare shortages and need for trained medical staff in Smoky Lake, Boykiw’s inner voice said, “Why not me?”
“Why not go back with the intent that I'll graduate and go into my community and be able to help fill a position that maybe nobody has even applied for because there are no people interested in staying in that small of a town,” she said, explaining her desire to stay local.
But hometown support was not Boykiw’s only motivation for changing her career path later in life. At the same time the 47-year-old was also in a position where her senior parents required more medical support at home than she was capable of providing on her own. Knowing that the reality of finding someone with the right availability and training in her small community was a bleak endeavour — not just for her family but others in her community — she decided to jump in.
Being a part of what she calls the “sandwich generation” — people who have been tasked with taking care of aging parents while simultaneously rearing their own children during their middle-age — Boykiw knows first-hand the trickle-down effects of living in a community that can be underserved by healthcare support. It is what has propelled her forward in the medical field, transitioning from a trained medical lab technologist to an LPN.
“I went back into nursing, because I literally had friends and acquaintances say, ‘rural communities are always short staffed and there's always a need.’” she said reflecting back on her own experiences.
So, with the support of her family behind her and her oldest child graduating from high school, she enrolled at Portage College and began the nearly three-hour round-trip daily commute to and from the college’s St. Paul Campus in the hope of using her abilities to give back to her community.
“I'm a firm believer in lifelong learning,” Boykiw said. “I look at schooling, as not a means to an end, I look at it as a way of improving myself and finding a way to offer things back from what I have learned.”
Top student
Laura Papirny, was the instructor at Portage College who oversaw Boykiw and her fellow classmate through the College’s Practical Nurse program. Reflecting on Boykiw’s time in the program, Papirny told Lakeland Today, “I wish to extend a huge congratulations to her on this truly amazing achievement. I don't have words. It's amazing.”
Over the span of two years, Papirny, taught and guided Boykiw through theory courses, labs and three clinical placements all in the midst of a global pandemic in course that she describes as “extremely challenging in itself.”
Papirny says, Boykiw is not only humble but “has demonstrated flexibility, tenacity and she was always looked to as a role model by her peers... Despite these unprecedented pandemic times, with all the added challenges with the technology and online learning, in an already very challenging nursing program, Lisa has been able to excel on this journey. I'm very proud of her and wish her every success."
