On December 17, 2018 Dr. Bungay was awarded the Excellence in Advancing Nursing Knowledge & Research Award at the inaugural awards ceremony of newly formed Nurses and Nurse Practitioners of BC (NNPBC).
She was nominated for her work focusing on addressing inequities that negatively affect people’s health and wellbeing including the devastating effects of stigma, discrimination and violence. She considers how research partnerships can positively impact communities that are regularly excluded in health and social policy planning. Her commitment to foregrounding community priorities in programming that affects people’s lives in a meaningful way is a model of how community-based interventions support “real world” evidence. Her current research and partnerships are tackling such issues as research ethics in practice, equity-oriented care, gender–based violence, and evidence-informed recommendations to promote and protect the health, safety and human rights of people engaged in the adult commercial sex industry.
The scope of Dr. Bungay’s research continues to expand as she engages in intersectoral partnerships at both the provincial and national levels. She partners with researchers from diverse disciplines (e.g. Philosophy, Social Work), and with a wide range of community partners (e.g. sex worker organizations, Health Authorities) bringing the significant contributions of nursing and nursing research to multiple knowledge development and mobilization efforts. She is also extending the horizons of nursing research methodologies by innovating in the area of unstructured data analytics to incorporate large data sets not often feasible in qualitative analyses. This may allow greater sources of data as well as longitudinal material to be included in analyses that are overlooked because they are difficult to analyze on a large scale.
She is also expanding her emphasis on the development of the next generation of researchers in nursing and health equity. In addition to mentoring emerging nursing and interdisciplinary researchers, she is a champion of building community capacity, and a stellar ambassador for nursing.
