Karen Paulhus , Alberta Health Services
Karen works in a Mental Health Clinic in Edmonton with the Rapid Housing Initiative Team that I am a part of.
The Rapid Housing Initiative Team is a new team within the Addictions and Mental Health Housing portfolio at AHS – 108 Street Mental Health Clinic. The team provides consultation and case management support to five new sites that will eventually provide access to housing, physical and mental health supports, community services, social connection and cultural supports to more than 200 individuals that, in many cases, have been experiencing long-term struggles with homelessness, trauma, addictions and mental health issues.
Karen came to this team with a wealth of experience and knowledge from a career that now spans more than 30 years in nursing. After completing her education at Saskatchewan Polytechnic in Regina, she began working at a hospital in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. Her personal life brought her to Alberta, where she started working at the Alberta Hospital Edmonton – mostly in adult acute psychiatry settings. She contributed to the care of patients in this setting from 1990 until about 2004 before transitioning into community services and joining the Clip Program.
When the Assertive Community Treatment Team was formed in 2006, Karen was instrumental in building, establishing and maintaining a solid foundation for the activities of this group of health professionals in the service provision to clients in an outreach capacity. For about 10 years Karen was the point person for intake into the ACT program and she was considered one of the faces of the team as it was received in the community. She managed to build lasting relationships with clients, families, agencies, physicians and other stakeholders that the team and the entire organization is benefiting from to this day.
Karen has been instrumental and inspirational for many of my co-workers along their career path in health care. She provides encouragement and guidance, empowers people daily, bridges gaps, understands systemic challenges, leverages everybody’s creativity and fosters inclusion and sharing. Her intuition and tremendous knowledge allowed her to match service providers with clients and through this process to meet the strengths, resources and needs of everybody involved. Karen is a fierce advocate for all her clients and goes above and beyond to ensure the health and wellbeing of individuals that are often in the most severe crisis of their lives. Recently, she has been an invaluable asset to yet another team that is just getting off the ground and is finding its bearings in the landscape of addiction and mental health services.
Karen’s dedication to compassionate mental health care, harm reduction, capacity building, service delivery and relationships with clients has been nothing short of an inspiration to all the new team members including myself as the Social Worker in the group. Meeting a new co-worker like Karen and getting to know her has been nothing short of a pleasure for me and my fellow teammates. Karen embodies the idea of holistic, wrap-around, assertive care with a fierce intent to make a difference for people – no matter what it takes. Whenever you meet someone that is as passionate about their work as she is, you are reminded that we are all inter-connected and that we all need to be well to do well. Every day we touch so many lives in our work, every day we get the opportunity to share a part of ourselves with people that are highly vulnerable and have to be able to depend on our professionalism, our diligence, our compassion, our expertise, our ability to listen, our nurturing and our empathy. Being able to work alongside a nurse like Karen is a great privilege and allows us to reflect on how meaningful human connection can be – way beyond the sheer professional tool sets we all use in our day to day practice.
Nominated by Michael Toepfer, Social Worker
