Scarborough nurse makes strides in pageant world, advocates for nursing

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By day, Scarborough’s Teisha Lee is a nurse who does home care for pediatric patients 25 and younger.

But in her off hours, the current Ms Toronto — a sometime model — was crowned Ms North America World Universal 2025 a couple of weeks ago in Montreal.

“I’ve been doing modelling for awhile, but for pageantry, I just started it this year,” said Lee, 34, who faced  36 contestants.

“There’s so much work behind the scenes that goes on,” she added. “There’s a lot of coaching. There’s a lot of walking. There’s a lot of interview prep that you have to do. Also the expectation that people have because sometimes you want to please people but you’re only human so it was really hard for that (part) for sure.”

Lee, who immigrated to Canada from Jamaica 18 years ago, represented Toronto at the Ms Canada Inc Pageant held in Montreal on July 19, which she won. She was also crowned Ms North America World Universal 2025 and will compete internationally next year in Kenya.

The pageant required Lee to take part in an evening gown segment, a catwalk walk, answer an on-the-spot question and do an interview — the latter which gave her the chance to advocate for nurses.

Lee — who likes rock climbing, track and field and owns a 12-year-old cat, Lucky — has been a nurse for nine years and previously worked at Scarborough General Hospital and Providence Health Care, a rehabilitation hospital for post-surgical patients.

“I based my advocacy off nurses’ well-being,” said Lee, who now works for VHA (Visiting Home Aid). “So for me, I’m working at the bedside, and it’s a lot of things behind the scenes that a lot of people really don’t know about. So I really wanted to shed light to that.

“That was the main point of my advocacy to show that ‘OK, we’re frontline workers, we are the face of health care, and we are also the backbone of health care.’ But these are the issues that we are facing. We have so many burnouts in the system,” she added. “There’s a big shortage of nurses all across Canada. So that’s what I really wanted to bring to the forefront.”

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The pageant was live-streamed from Montreal so Lee’s family could watch but the celebration has yet to happen.

“My dad called me because he watched the live stream and he was pretty excited and everything,” said Lee, who also has three siblings and a mom.

“My dad was really encouraging throughout the whole process. I’m planning to do a celebration with everyone together like my family but it’s really hard to get everyone in one place. But that’s my mission so we can all celebrate this accomplishment.”