Rachel Burwell

Biography

Rachel completed her degree at Mount Royal College in 2005 and initially worked at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in trauma/neurosurgery and ICU. On her return to Calgary, she took a position in the emergency department at Rocky View Hospital. She also worked as part of the Calgary Sexual Assault Response Team. Rachel worked as a school nurse over in Abu Dhabi when her family was living overseas.  

When she moved home to Canada in 2014, she returned to the ER as she was completing her Master of Nursing with an education focus. Rachel also worked in the High River Hospital in both acute care and the emergency department. She has worked casually in an IV clinic for the last few years. She started teaching for Bow Valley College in 2015 where she used a synchronous online approach to teach multiple rural cohorts at a time. Rachel was a program chair at Bow Valley College for the nursing program in 2020 before moving to Red Deer Polytechnic to facilitate their synchronous delivery of the HCA program in late 2020. 

In August 2023, Rachel joined the Practical Nurse Diploma at RDP as full-time faculty and is currently serving as their curriculum lead in the program redevelopment. Rachel’s professional highlights include presenting in collaboration with Microsoft in the spring of 2020 on how to teach using Microsoft Teams and winning the Alberta Nursing Educators Administration Award for Leadership in Nursing in 2019. She has also been involved in reviewing and editing chapters of textbooks for Elsevier.  

Education

• M.N. (Education), Athabasca University
• B.Sc. (Nursing), Mount Royal University