LAKELAND - The first cohort of nursing students to complete their Bachelor of Science in Nursing through the University of Calgary and Covenant Health will begin their studies in September 2025.
According to Shelly Franklin, the site administrator at the Bonnyville Health Care Centre, there were over 50 applicants for the program, and they were able to take six Indigenous and six rural students for the inaugural class.
“This program is going to kind of emulate what I had gone through when I first became a nurse. So our labs, our simulation room and our theory room are going to be upstairs, and then they'll do a lot of work virtually from home,” said Franklin.
The partnership between UCalgary and Covenant Health will see similar programs rolled out by hospitals in several rural communities around the province, including Bonnyville, Drayton Valley, and Wainwright. The program aims to address the chronic shortage of nurses in rural and remote communities by allowing the opportunity to learn without having to travel.
Franklin said it is important to remember that recruitment doesn’t start when people are in nursing school.
“We have to get into the community, into the high schools, and get the high school students engaged into if they want to pursue a healthcare profession. And so, I think this has been fabulously taken on, and we ourselves at the hospital are very engaged in that project, and along with my team,” said Franklin, noting there is a high school skills day planned for September as well.
Bonnyville currently has two emergency room RN positions and one LPN position posted on the Covenant Health jobs board. The hospital had 30 short-term contracts filled by an outside staffing agency between April and October 2024.
According to Brenda Poole, the senior director of operations rural/acute for Covenant Health, they are also looking at more “Grow Your Own” programs, following the success of Grow Your Own Health Care Aide.
“We're looking at Grow Your Own LPN to RN programs. Shelley's got the Bachelor of Science Nursing program coming to Bonnyville, we are looking at Grow Your Own for some of our other [positions] like Occupational Health Safety, physiotherapy, diagnostic imaging. So, we're really looking at designing a plan that's going to sustain the workforce at our rural sites for 20 or 30 years to come,” said Poole.
