ST. PAUL/ELK POINT – Over 20 Francophone nursing and healthcare aide students from the University of Alberta (U of A) toured St. Paul and Elk Point last weekend, Oct. 21-23, to receive an interactive, skills-based introduction to working in a rural Alberta setting. The visit was part of Rural Health Professions Action Plan’s (RhPAP) “Let’s Go Rural!” initiative.
The 21 nursing students are from the U of A’s Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BScN) Bilingual program, a collaboration between the U of A’s Faculty of Nursing and Faculté Saint-Jean, according to Claire Tellier, an assistant teaching professor with the U of A’s Faculty of Nursing. The three healthcare aide students are from Faculté Saint-Jean’s Health Care Aide program. Both groups are Francophone and bilingual (English/French) students.
Tellier said the visit allowed the students to experience what living and working in a rural setting looks like. She hopes some students will complete their clinical placements in the region, “as well as potentially pursuing careers in rural nursing to meet the needs of rural populations,” including serving the Francophone minority populations in western and northern Canada. According to Tellier, all the students volunteered for the experience, and the visit was not part of the curriculum.
She explained the importance of the visit, referring to the ongoing challenge of recruitment and retention of healthcare workers in rural Alberta and throughout the province.
“So, we’re hoping that by exposing these students,” some of whom have never visited rural areas, “to see what it’s like to work, live, and play in a rural setting. It will encourage them to hopefully do some clinical placements in the area that might lead to permanent employment.”
Among the goals of the visit, according to Tellier, is highlighting the Francophone community in St. Paul/Elk Point and potentially having “nurses be able to provide health care services in French.”
Anita Fagnan, RhPAP’s rural community consultant for the Northeast Zone, shares Tellier’s thoughts, in that she hopes the Francophone students will fit right in with St. Paul and Elk Point’s Francophone community.
“If it’s a place they can practice their language and cultures,” in addition to filling vacancies of nurses and healthcare aides in rural Alberta, “that’s a win-win,” said Fagnan.
“In the future, the long-term goal would be to see the interest from this group to return to do their preceptorship or future employment opportunities in the area,” she said, and if not, then “hopefully in other rural places across the province as well.”
Sara Mack-Peterson, student-lead and among the students at the visit, was “pleasantly surprised by how welcoming everyone is here.” She added, “A couple of my friends are commenting how all these people feel like ‘my grandparents, aunts, uncles’ – they all feel very familiar.”
Included in the students’ itinerary was St. Therese Hospital. Mack-Peterson said the staff was welcoming and inviting, encouraging the students to ask questions they may have in mind. “You don’t always get that same sort of dynamic elsewhere,” she said.
In addition, as someone who grew up in a big city, she was curious about what “it looks like” to be in a smaller community. As a student in the BScN (Bilingual) program, she said she also signed up to “get more exposure” to what the bilingual program is about, which, she explained, includes responding to the “needs of the people in our area that are French speakers as well.”
Maureen Miller, Mayor of the Town of St. Paul, said the visit is part of an attraction-retention project that has been years in the making in partnership with municipalities like the County of St. Paul and the Town of Elk Point to address staff shortages in healthcare within Elk Point and St. Paul.
In the St. Paul, lack of staff led to issues like St. Therese Hospital “indefinitely” closing ten beds, according to Miller.
She also said exposing “our communities” to individuals new to the healthcare profession will give them an opportunity to experience “where’d they like to specialize” in their own profession. In addition, the visit will “hopefully lead to picking up a few of these nurses and healthcare aides within our facilities.”
She credited RhPAP and the U of A for their assistance in “getting exposure to our facilities. It seemed like an excellent match to have Faculté Saint-Jean nursing students because they are Francophone.”
Miller said among the advantages of working in a rural area is that it’s easier for healthcare professionals to find a permanent position. “So, that is a huge attraction to somebody coming early into the field.”
“They’ve got debt, or if they want to experience multiple levels within the healthcare profession,” rural areas allow the opportunity to work in fields like mental health, obstetrics, emergency, or palliative care, said Miller. She said this would also help healthcare professionals choosing to go back to urban areas with the experiences they’ve gained.
“Many professionals come [to rural communities] as the first step to developing their own profession, and we’re fine with that . . . and hopefully maybe they would like the community and stay,” she said, adding she also sees exposing them to rural communities as an opportunity to expand the perspective of what it is like to work and live in a rural community.
Retaining people like healthcare professionals requires working with members of the community. “If the community wants residents to stay within our community, the community needs to be willing to be open and welcoming,” she said, by engaging newcomers in their activities, “and that’s the community’s responsibility.”
The students’ St. Paul visit also included entertainment by Francophone musician Jose Piquette, a town tour and an Indigenous culture presentation.
Elk Point visit
Sunday saw the visitors travel through thick fog to Elk Point for brunch prepared by Elk Point Healthcare Auxiliary and Palliative Care volunteers, where they were welcomed by Elk Point Healthcare Centre (EPHC) facility manager Brenda Haire-Killam, Brittany Ross of Parkview Extended Care, Town of Elk Point Coun. Wanda Cochrane and a Francophone welcome by Town of Elk Point Municipal Enforcement Officer Michael Niesen.
A door prize draw saw one of the visiting students go home with a beautiful quilt made and donated by one of the morning’s chefs, Margaret Urquhart.
The students heard two views of what it is like to work in Elk Point’s healthcare setting, one via ZOOM by a former staff member who worked in Elk Point for three of her 16 years of nursing and who is still mentored by Haire-Killam and Ross as she continues her career in other communities across Alberta. Now in a program to become a nurse practitioner, she found Elk Point to be “great, and the doctors are very supportive too, they teach you as you go.”
“It’s a super exciting time to be a nurse,” she told the group. “You’re coming in at a time with a lot of great opportunities, and a lot of gaps because of COVID. After you get one year in a sold site, you can do anything.”
EPHC staff member Kirandeep Kaur told the group she had been here four of her 14 years of nursing, with three of those years required to “bridge the gap between India and Canada” and getting experience in acute care, emergency and long term care. Formerly living in Calgary, she had “never heard of Elk Point, and I had my doubts… but found smaller communities like Elk Point are the right place to raise a family, and I’ve seen cases I had not in Calgary. Here I practice everything, it’s comprehensive nursing and you feel you’ve done something to help patients.”
After a brisk walk to the Healthcare Centre, the visitors were divided into two groups, taking turns to tour the facility with Haire-Killam and climbing aboard horse-drawn wagons driven by Morris Irvine and Lionel Romanchuk for town tours narrated by Dwayne Vogel and Coun. Jason Boorse.
With the tours completed, the students were joined by local RCMP members and firefighters to take part in some hilarious wheelchair races in the healthcare centre’s halls before they gathered for a group photo and door prize draws, accepted bag lunches and swag bags from Cochrane and Boorse on behalf of the Town of Elk Point and climbed back on the bus for their return trip to Edmonton.
