Kimberly McMillan

Kim McMillan is an associate professor in the School of Nursing, University of Ottawa, and an academic mentor for the Palliative Care and Nursing Ethics Hub. She has worked clinically in pediatric oncology and holds specialty certification in hospice and palliative care from the Canadian Nurses Association.

Dr. McMillan’s research examines the intersection of organizational life and ethical, relational and political nursing practice, focusing on how nurses experience and navigate their practice within highly complex health-care systems. Her research program is grounded in relational ontology and critical and feminist epistemologies. It mobilizes qualitative methodologies, with three main interacting areas of research focus: complexity of organizational life; nurses and nursing work; and ethical, relational and socio-political practice.

Personal website

Professor McMillan is accepting new students for thesis supervision.

• Nursing work
• Nursing ethics
• Institutional ethics
• Moral distress
• Corporatization of care
• Pediatric nursing practice
• Palliative and end of life nursing practice

The first area focus of Dr. McMillan’s research, guided by critical scholarship (Foucault, critical management studies), examines how a variety of sociopolitical and historical contexts shape nurses’ organizational lives.

The second area, guided by feminist scholarship, examines how nurses engage in their work, and how their work is mitigated by many factors both within (policies, procedures, technologies) and beyond nurses’ work environment (political decision-making, society’s construction of nursing). 
The third area, guided by relational ethics, examines the ways ethical, relational and political nursing practice is supported or thwarted at the individual, team, institutional and societal levels. It examines the interplay between individual ethics and institutional ethics, which mediate Dr. McMillan’s second area of focus and shape her first. 

Peer-reviewed journal articles