Turning Data into Recommendations
With two undergraduate programs, four graduate offerings and staff, faculty and students spread among six sites in Saskatchewan, it’s not always an easy task to gather data in the College of Nursing, but that’s about to change.
Welcome Suzana Lazic, Strategic Analyst for the College of Nursing.
In the newly created two year Strategic Analyst term position, Suzana will find, analyze and produce data to help the college with its’ reporting to government and other agencies. She will work with data to identify trends and patterns that form strategic recommendations. The College hopes to answer questions about how our nursing education program affects the students, the communities we are a part of and the province as a whole.
"We’ve found there is a great need to develop measures and evaluation tools to track our programming," said College of Nursing Dean Dr. Lorna Butler. "For example, we have put so much effort into our distributed learning approaches, we want to understand if what we are doing is making a difference and how we can provide that leadership beyond our college and the nursing profession. Looking at the data of our distributed learning approaches will inform our future practice, but the inclusion of different metrics will be key. For example, in the northern nursing program, we want to see what difference distributed learning makes and how it may differ from learning at the Prince Albert Campus, which is more urban. Does a nursing education program help build capacity from a community development model for the communities where we distribute our program? Does Learn Where You Live really make a difference? It’s these kinds of questions we’re hoping the data will help us to answer and make recommendations on."
When asked about her new role, Suzana replied, "I am excited to take this unique job opportunity with the College of Nursing and use an innovative way to evaluate strategic initiatives. Through the evaluation of key performance indicators, I will make sure measures of the College’s goals are measured, evaluated and overall, strategic objectives are met. One of the indicators I’m most excited about is measuring the social impact our graduates will have in the north."
About Suzana: Suzana has a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and a Master of Business Administration, both from the University of Saskatchewan (U of S). She has worked at the U of S for 13 years and in her most recent position as Programmer Analyst with Student Information Systems (SIS), she was the technical lead on a number of major projects where she was responsible for gathering information, analyzing data, designing, testing and deploying systems and communicating with end-users. Prior to working in SIS, Suzana was a Programmer for the university’s Financial Service Division for five years.
Welcome to the College of Nursing Suzana!