For Marijana Loncar, it was an average of 91 percent in high school that allowed her to enter Brock University’s four-year degree program for registered nurses.
It’s the kind of average that’s common in programs, which are so sought after that Queen’s University in Kingston, for example, received nearly 1,900 applications from students competing for one of the program’s 124 seats last fall.
That means many people who want to enter the field are left out of their careers, as Ontario faces a nursing shortage that has become apparent and worsened due to the current COVID-19 pandemic.
The Ontario Registered Nurses Association sets the current deficit of registered nurses at 22,022. Ontario saw only 4,595 nurses graduate from an RN degree program in 2020, according to the government. While that’s more than double the number of graduates in 2006, critics say the province needs a specific plan that delivers much faster results. And many doubt that changes in legislation and new programs related to nurse education will fill the gap.
“An evidence-based strategy involving multiple stakeholders, including acute, long-term and community care, professional associations and nursing education providers, is urgently needed to assess current needs and plan for the future of the force. nursing work, ”said Linda Johnston, dean. from the University of Toronto Lawrence S. Bloomberg School of Nursing.
One of the biggest changes in nursing education came in February 2020, just a month before the pandemic hit Canada in full force, when the province announced that universities could have their own independent four-year programs to registered nurses without having to associate with a university. , which many had done since the early 2000s, when registered nurses were required to earn a degree rather than a diploma.
Humber College, St. Lawrence College, Georgian College, Seneca College and York University, which have so far partnered with Georgian, had received approval from the ministry to offer independent bachelor’s degree programs in nursing in early December 2021, according to a spokesperson for the Ministry of Colleges and Universities.
But it may not make it easy to enter a nursing degree program for the thousands of students vying for spots, the demand for which has doubled in recent years.
Enrollment in bachelor of science nursing programs at Ontario universities and college collaboration programs increased by 630 places last fall, adding to the prior year’s freshman enrollment of 4,400, according to the Council on Colleges. of Ontario.
Steve Orsini, chairman and chief executive officer of the council, says Ontario universities continue to work with the government to ensure they can meet the demand for registered nurses, “including supporting the government’s commitment announced in the Fall Economic Declaration to create 1,000 additional new registered nurses. posts for fall 2022 ”.
Although the new four-year college programs may increase the overall number of spaces, experts say the biggest impact will be increasing the number of registered nurses in rural areas, who will be able to attend local schools, and who will be more likely to live and live. . I work in those communities.
Georgian College, for example, loses about half of the graduates of its collaborative RN degree program with York University, where students complete their final two years, to GTA.
“In our experience, nearly 50 percent of students did not return to their local communities after graduation. They stayed in town, ”said Sara Lankshear, Georgian associate dean for health, wellness and science.
“That has a significant impact on the availability of registered nurses in our local communities.”
Georgian has a campus in Barrie as well as Owen Sound, which means that registered nurses can now carry out their clinical practices in communities where they can later be employed and where it is particularly difficult to recruit nurses.
“That’s huge for a nursing crisis, particularly in smaller cities and also in rural cities,” Lankshear said.
It will also eliminate the financial hardships of having to move or travel.
Georgian was not the only university to partner with a university in another city. Humber College previously partnered with the University of New Brunswick and St. Lawrence College, which has campuses in Kingston, Brockville and Cornwall, partnered with Laurentian University.
“There are some people whose dream of being a RN was out of their reach because they just couldn’t afford to have to move or drive back and forth to the GTA for the last two years of their (title). ), ”Lankshear said. “And for the students who were in our programs, they found it to be quite difficult.”
Applications for Georgian’s program, which begins in 2022, have already increased.
While bringing in new nurses is of course important, keeping those already in the field is a huge challenge and something that has seen less attention from official government channels.
Loncar, who now works at Credit Valley Hospital in Mississauga as a floating nurse, meaning she is assigned to understaffed units, said a number of factors are affecting nurse retention.
“Burnout is number 1,” he said.
But also, “the increased number of patients and the acuity of patients are now much more extreme because people have been afraid to go to the hospital to focus on their health,” he added. “So they are much sicker.”
Loncar spent the night before talking to Star on the COVID floor, caring for patients who needed full care, meaning they required assistance turning, feeding and changing.
“We have more patients who require comprehensive and personalized care,” he said. “And when you have six to seven patients a night, it is very difficult to be able to connect with your patients.”
Another factor affecting retention is Ontario Bill 124, which caps pay increases for nurses and other public workers to one percent.
“We are not being compensated financially in the way that we should,” Loncar said. “It has shocked many senior nurses who feel that it is too difficult for them to stay given the acuity of some of these patients.”
The bill also fuels the notion that nurses are not worth compensating, said Dianne Martin, executive director of the Ontario Registered Practical Nurses Association.
“I think there is also the problem of being categorized as’ We are not going to worry about his salary. We may worry about the police or whoever, but we are not going to worry about yours, ‘”he said.
“And I think at a time when you’re giving more than you can really give, I think that’s just discouraging to the point where people are so easily disillusioned.
“It is a bitter pill to swallow.”
Forty years ago, when Martin joined the profession, the education and expectations were very different.
“When I became a nurse, we didn’t do a lot of synthesis,” she said. “They told us the answers and we carried out what we were supposed to do.
“But now we are expected to solve the problems at a very high level.”
As nursing gained professionalism and the skills and knowledge of nurses were used to a greater extent, the educational requirements also changed. In 2005, registered nurses were required to obtain a degree from a university, and diploma programs for practical nurses changed from 10 months to a minimum of two years.
“As people realized that nurses could do many things that other people had done before, the education that needed to happen advanced: our knowledge of chronic diseases, the technology, all of those things, particularly the research. The knowledge needed to evaluate all of that became much greater, ”said Martin, who graduated as an RPN and later became an RN.
And with that came another big change: Nurses left the profession.
“We didn’t used to have that problem in nursing. The nurses became nurses and were nurses for life, ”Martin said. “And now we have a problem where nursing has changed. And we have been expecting things from nurses that go far beyond what a human being can bear. ”
“So what we have to do is solve those problems because we can keep adding nurses to the system,” says Martin. “But if we don’t retain them, we are not ready to move forward in solving this crisis.”
Reference-www.thestar.com