Meet Megan Greenough

In Canada, less than 1 per cent of nurses are Nurse Practitioners (NP) and have a PhD. At CHEO, we have one of them: Megan Greenough.

Since high school, Megan knew she wanted to go into healthcare and become a nurse practitioner. She did both her undergraduate and her master’s at the University of Ottawa and when she graduated, thought that would be the end of her formal education journey.

Megan had been working as an RN at The Ottawa Hospital before she joined CHEO in 2016 as an NP in the Interdisciplinary Pediatric Chronic Pain Program. At the time, she had no desire to get her PhD. After all, she already did seven years of school. She had already become the NP she wanted to be.

But when Megan was tasked with triaging referrals, she soon realized that she didn’t have what she needed to do the job to her satisfaction. There was no standardized pathway or tool to guide these complex triage decisions, which has a serious impact on timely access to care for those with complex and urgent biopsychosocial (biological, psychological and social) needs.

So Megan decided to do research. But there was one problem: there was hardly any research done on triaging complex children and youth with chronic pain.

That’s when Megan realized that to give patients the best chance of fair and timely access to care, she was going to have do the work herself. So in the fall of 2017, she went back to uOttawa to earn her PhD.

“The clinical need is what really drove me. I'm going to have to come up with a tool that is evidence-based and really well done. And I thought, to do this, well, I have to go and do this doctorate.”

Her dissertation, or research project, involved a multi-phased, mixed methods study meant to design and develop a Clinical Decision Support (CDS) triage tool for referred children and youth to interdisciplinary chronic pain programs. She successfully defended her thesis this past September.

The end result?

She now has this evidence-based tool that was missing when she first started at CHEO. She has the research to back up how she triages patients. There is still more refining to do, but she is saving the time of children and youth because they’re getting seen when they’re supposed to.

As of now, Megan has three studies that combine the data she found and uses that to inform how she triages patients. Not an easy feat to accomplish while working full-time during a pandemic and juggling two babies!

In addition to triaging, Megan manages both outpatients and inpatients with chronic pain. She also is a member of the Ontario Pediatric Chronic Pain Network and hopes to develop more knowledge and research in pediatric chronic pain at a provincial, national and international level.

The most rewarding part of her job?

“Definitely working with patients and their families to not only improve their pain but see the quality of their life improve. Seeing them achieve goals and slowly start to regain their confidence and their identity and meaning in life, for sure is the most rewarding.”