B.C. nursing schools continue to enroll keen students despite pandemic challenges

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) — Despite the harassment, vitriol, and long shifts the pandemic has amplified for front line workers for the past year and a half, some nursing schools in B.C. have seen a boost in enrollment demand.

At the University of British Columbia (UBC), there’s no shortage of interested applicants, according to Elizabeth Saewyc, the director at the School of Nursing.

“Regularly, in all the different schools of nursing around Canada, we have a large number of applicants, more than we have space for,” she tells CityNews. “Just as an example, here at UBC in Vancouver, we have 120 seats available now. We are in the midst of working with the government to expand that, but last year, we had 860 applications for those 120 seats. So there are a lot of people who are actually applying for the program.”

Saewyc says the university has definitely seen a bump in applications during the pandemic compared to the previous year.

Meanwhile, at Douglas College, Dr. Pamela Cawley, the dean of Health Sciences, says, “We have a year-and-a-half waitlist to come into the program.”

“I can’t say we’ve had an increase or a decrease,” she says. However, she adds, “The interest has remained strong regardless of the students coming into this program. It’s a different time, maybe there’s different questions, but the numbers haven’t changed significantly.”

Langara College, Okanagan College and Vancouver Community College also said they saw similar trends, with applications remaining, at the very least, steady.

Ann Syme, dean at the faculty of nursing at Langara, says students “don’t seem to be scared away by the pandemic,” as the school continues to see three times the applicants.

COVID-19 impacting student’s takeaways

At UBC, Saewyc says the pandemic has been a motivating factor for potential students.

“In their applications, they actually talk about the pandemic, motivating them to look at nursing as a career in a new way and wanting to contribute and to help out.”

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And learning throughout the pandemic has pushed students like those in the Douglas program to unique limits, according to Cawley.

“The difference [learning through the] COVID [pandemic] I think for the students is they’ve learned what their level of resilience and adaptability is. So I think that’s actually quite an important skill you wouldn’t have gained in another way,” she says.

Syme at Langara adds, “I think part of what’s feeding this too is that nurses who are in the field right now, is a lot of the seniors’ nurses who are very, very taxed with the COVID situation. And so we know within the discipline, many will be choosing to retire, and just because of this; just because we’ve strained the system over the past year and a half.”

Practicing nursing continues to fall short

But the eagerness among applicants doesn’t mean B.C. will see a flood of nurses anytime soon.

“Nursing is very much a program of both practice and theory, and the practice happens in the health authorities,” Syme explains. “So in the health authorities right now, it’s a bit tough — we call those our clinical placements experiences. So those clinical placements are very precious, and I don’t think we’re in a position right now where we could say, ‘could you have more students?'”

She suggests education institutions and services need to collaborate to find a solution because there needs to be a balance between the number of nursing students graduating and job positions available.

As for government action, B.C.’s Premier John Horgan says he’s committed to retention and recruitment but that more time is needed to train everyone, including nurses who come from other countries.

Saewyc suggests there also needs to be a collaborative effort to create a working environment that is sustainable for nurses new to the industry or not.

“I’m sure many people have seen the stories … of the pandemic, where the experiences in the healthcare setting are really, really difficult for people and long hours and nursing shortages that make it that much harder for people to provide the safe and expert care that they want to. So that creates a level of moral distress for nurses and other health care professionals who cannot provide the care that they’re educated to do and that distress can cause burnout.”

While Saewyc can’t provide exact numbers, she says from her experience a number of graduates that start to practice leave the profession fairly quickly.

“So understanding how we can create a workplace that keeps people and keeps them in the profession is a key part of this,” she says. “Because as they retain nurses, and as they hire more nurses, that means that we have more spaces for nursing students to actually get the education, they need to increase the number of nurses. So you get that positive feedback loop rather than the negative feedback loop of — shortage, not enough spaces, not enough places for students.”

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