Dr. Sanders, MBE, is an Associate Professor in the School of Nursing at UNBC. Having held a clinical academic position in the United Kingdom, Dr. Sanders remains an interdisciplinary scholar focusing on child health, rare conditions, and action-and-participant-orientated engagement. Research focuses on child and family health and well-being. Dr. Sanders applies qualitative and mixed-method approaches, specifically phenomenology, narrative inquiry, and participatory action research, often framed within patient-oriented research. Clinical-academic research methods focus on rare conditions and early childhood, explicitly focusing on developing and translating knowledge across healthcare and community boundaries. Research and international collaborations have focused on the experiences and impact of living with a rare condition, specifically how the medical landscape influences choice and informed decision-making. Caroline has a longstanding partnered research program within the field of variation in sex development with a focus on exploring the meaning and impact of living with a rare condition by uncovering the influences that shape gender, wellness, resilience, and long-term health outcomes.

Caroline’s research program concerns early childhood development, how knowledge is both created and taken up in practice to improve health in the early years for rural and northern children and their families and communities. Working with interdisciplinary providers, community partners, decision-makers, children, youth, and their families and young adults, scholarship focuses on discovery and applied science. Within a framework of compassionate systems leadership, Caroline is focused on understanding how the implementation and impact of relevant knowledge can be developed and used to evaluate healthcare approaches and interventions in academic and applied clinical contexts, such as decision-making, program engagement and evaluation. An emerging area of scholarship focuses on the nursing workforce in rural settings, specifically domestic internationally-educated nurses. Caroline has published and presented widely on variations of sex development, early childhood health and well-being and clinical and northern issues, and has developed numerous knowledge translation outputs.