Suzanne Fredericks

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7462-636X

Dr. Fredericks is a Nurse Scientist whose program of research focuses on designing and evaluating interventions to support patients undergoing invasive surgical procedures. She has received advanced research methods training through the Canadian Institute of Health Research Randomized Controlled Trials Mentorship Training Program and the Cochrane Collaboration. Dr. Fredericks is an active researcher within the Cochrane Heart Group.

Dr. Fredericks is a Professor in the Daphne Cockwell School of Nursing at Toronto Metropolitan University. She is an active member of the Maurice Yeates School of Graduate Studies and supervises graduate theses. She has served as the Program Director of Toronto Metropolitan University's Master of Nursing Program (2016-2019).

Dr. Fredericks has served as a member of the Board of Directors for the Canadian Council of Cardiovascular Nurses (as Director of Publications) and the Lambda Pi-At-Large Chapter of Sigma Theta Tau International (as President, Vice-President and Past-President). She has also served as the Editor for the Canadian Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing (July 1, 2015-June 28, 2016), an Associate Editor for the Canadian Journal of Nursing Research (2013-2017), and is currently an Associate Editor for the British Journal of Cardiac Nursing (2016-present) and the Latin American Journal of Nursing (2019-present). Dr. Fredericks is a co-founder of the International Health Trends and Perspectives journal, and CONNECT: the Cardiac surgery internatiONal Nursing and alliEd professional researCh neTwork.

Dr. Fredericks research program aims to develop and evaluate interventions to support individuals after experiencing invasive procedures. To this end, she has examined educational interventions delivered to patients following invasive surgical procedures, in order to determine their overall effectiveness in enhancing self-care behaviour performance and reducing the rate of complications, onset and/or exacerbation of symptoms, mortality rates and hospital readmissions. She has also designed and led studies to improve our understanding of how and when to deliver educational interventions to patients postoperatively. In these studies, she examined different characteristics of educational interventions including their timing, dosage, medium and mode of delivery. The findings of these studies have led to the realization that not only do the characteristics of an intervention impact its effectiveness, but the characteristics of an individual also play a vital role in influencing the effectiveness of these interventions. Consequently, Dr. Fredericks has designed and implemented studies to examine the influence of various demographic characteristicssuch as culture, age, sex, marital status, educational level, and co-morbid conditions (i.e. anxiety and stress)on outcomes of interest. Awareness of the effect of these characteristics on the effectiveness of educational interventions has led to a call for revising how nurses engage with and mentor their patients. Several discussion papers have been written in response to these studies that focus solely on intervention redesign and reformatting of mentorship models.
 

Related Links

For a list of Dr. Fredericks' publications, please visit PubMed or Scopus.

Professor, Daphne Cockwell School of Nursing, Toronto Metropolitan University
CONNECT - Founding Member 
IHTP - Founding Member and Editor-in-Chief
FESC  - Member of the European Society of Cardiology; Member of the International Science Committee for the Association of Nurses and Allied Professionals
FCAN - Member of the Canadian Academy of Nursing