Rev. Faye Davenport is a Senior Lecturer - Nurse Education team at UCOL. She’s published a paper on ‘Providing palliative care in aged care’ in Kai Tiaki Nursing New Zealand. As a lecturer, her focus lies in preparing nursing students for the aged care environment. On the research side, she continues to look for ways to improve the support given to students who are providing end-of-life care for the first time.
Explaining her research work, she says, “Nursing students have anxieties about caring for clients who are at the end of their life. I was interested in the basis for that anxiety - how can nursing lecturers make that experience a positive one?” Rev. Davenport discovered that only a small percentage of nursing students feel comfortable providing end-of-life care. Students have different anxieties related to care of the dying and after-death care, such as how will they control their emotions as they provide care, what if they make a mistake, and what is the appropriate thing to say to the client or their family members in such times? The significant findings of her research were well received at Australasian Nurse Educators Conference (November 2019).
Rev. Davenport is currently leading a COVID-19-related research project with associate researchers Lucy Eade and Chloe Bidois. This time around, she’s interested in gaining an insight into what the lockdown experience was like for new nursing students and how well UCOL did as a whole. Questions like what students learned about themselves, how lockdown changed their style of learning, and how the need to move quickly from face-to-face to online learning caused an impact, will be explored.
When not at work, she’s busy carrying out her responsibilities as the ordained deacon of St Peter’s Anglican Church. Her hobbies include walking and motorhome adventures.