When Gillian Lemermeyer decided at age 17 to become a nurse, she was following in her mother's footsteps, so she expected her mom to be thrilled when she told her the news.
"I was surprised when she grew very serious," Lemermeyer remembers. "She said, 'OK, but do you understand what it means to be looking after people in this way?'"
Many years later, after working as a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) nurse and now as an assistant professor in the Faculty of Nursing, Lemermeyer understands the depth of her mother's question.
"What happens between a nurse and a patient is more than a transactional thing," she says. "Built in is the significance of the privilege we have as nurses to be alongside people as they're being born, as they're dying. It's meaningful work, and each of these moments contains ethics."
"My mother was passing along to me her whole nursing philosophy, and she's the best nurse I've ever known."
Lemermeyer's research focuses on the ethics of the nurse-patient relationship and how that relationship will be shaped by the proliferation of technology, particularly artificial intelligence, in health care.
Everyday ethics
Lemermeyer first became interested in ethics early in her career when she'd sometimes hear colleagues present what she considered to be a false dichotomy: Who would you prefer to take care of your child — someone with a good bedside manner or an expert clinician?
"I remember thinking, 'How in the world can they exist separately?'" she says.
