SUNDRE — Rural students who aspire to pursue a path in medicine face more obstacles than their urban counterparts, and that’s a gap a local committee endeavours to narrow down.
The Sundre Health Professionals Attraction and Retention Committee, a subcommittee of the Sundre Hospital Futures Committee, administers the delivery of two bursaries, including the Joanne Overguard Memorial Scholarship, with the objective of not only identifying local talent with an interest in health care, but also supporting students in achieving their goal as well as encouraging them to practise in Sundre after graduation.
The idea, explains Gerald Ingeveld, hospital futures committee chair, is to “Grow your own. That had a whole different meaning back before cannabis was legalized.”
Levity aside, Ingeveld emphasized in all seriousness the importance of providing opportunities for rural students who face a stiff financial hurdle.
“There’s a significant disadvantage to being a rural kid trying to go to university,” he said, citing as an example his own daughter’s experience, which involved spending about as much on room and board as the cost of tuition.
“So, it’s almost a double cost to be rural raised and then going off to the city for your education. If you look at the numbers, there’s significantly fewer rural kids getting university and college degrees than urban.
“There’s also a chronic shortage of health-care professionals in rural Alberta. We believe that the people that have a high probability of pursuing a health-care career, and then doing that career in rural Alberta, are kids that are raised in rural Alberta.
"You don’t eliminate any others, but there’s a very good chance that a person who is raised rural is going to want to seek rural for their career. They understand rural (life), and they know the benefits of living rural."
Students raised in urban settings never had much of a chance to be exposed to life in a rural community, and are therefore less likely to understand that an outstanding career in the medical field is obtainable in a rural area.
But even rural students considering a career in health care benefit from an opportunity to learn more about what that all entails, he said.
“That’s the basis for us doing things like the high school skills day and the nurses out from Red Deer College doing a skills day,” he said.
The recipient of this year’s annual Joanne Overguard Memorial Scholarship was Amanda Mifsud, who was also among some nursing students who prior to the pandemic had come out for a day to offer an introduction of what small, rural hospitals have to offer.
“They’re amazed,” he said about the program’s participants. “It’s just never crossed their minds what the scope of practice is at a small hospital.”
In a fully integrated facility like Sundre’s hospital, nursing staff must be well trained in multiple disciplines, compared with a city where they are assigned a specific unit or ward, he said.
The scholarship, worth $1,000, is specifically for students seeking to become a registered nurse.
The other bursary, also worth $1,000, is for those considering careers in a rural setting as lab workers, health-care aides, or even licensed practical nurses, he said.
An application form is available on the committee’s website, which has been undergoing an update, and the Sundre High School’s guidance counsellor also helps identify potential rural health care recruits, he said.
The scholarships and all the work the committee does are funded through donations, but as has been the experience with non-profit organizations, the past year has been a tough one, he said.
“Our donations are way down,” he said, adding last year’s gala had to be cancelled following several successful years.
The committee is considering plans to organize an outdoor version of the gala, perhaps in August by which point pandemic restrictions will have been relaxed enough to allow such an event to proceed, he said.
For now, the group is pleased that Mifsud decided to come back to Sundre.
“We’ll certainly be calling on her to be kind of the poster child,” said Ingeveld. “Because she’s exactly a success story — local person goes off to college, and then comes back to make her career out in the rural community she grew up in. To us, that’s exactly what we want to see.”
Full circle
Mifsud, who last December graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from a collaborative University of Alberta program that she took through Red Deer College, started her first official day at the Sundre hospital on Feb. 8
“I’m actually at the hospital right now,” she said on Feb. 26 during a morning interview following a night shift.
Although technically a grad nurse for now, Mifsud said she will become a full-fledged RN once she completes a board exam later this March.
Until then, she’s absorbing as much as she can from senior staff while at the same time relishing the opportunity to put into practise everything she’s learned to date.
“At night, we’re the co-team, we’re the unit clerk, we’re the nurse, we’re the lab — we’re everything,” she said.
“It’s nice, though. Because I keep all the skills I learned in school, and it challenges me to keep up with those skills, and learning new skills. It’s really actually quite great, even though it’s a challenge. There’s never a dull moment.”
Although originally born in Calgary, her family relocated when she was little to the Sundre area, where she was raised.
She now rents a place in Olds, and often frequents back and forth between both communities.
“I’m in Sundre every single day, even when I’m not working,” she said. “Eventually, because I’m really big into the rural life, I’d like to own a rural acreage, somewhere between Olds and Sundre.”
While she had already set her sights on a career in nursing, the committee helped to not only reinforce but also support that dream morally and financially, she said.
“When I was in my preceptorship, they mentioned that there’s a scholarship for students who are wanting to go into nursing. It just so happened that no one had applied for it this year, so they asked if I was interested,” she said.
The fact she was the only one to apply for the scholarship after being told about it is why the committee has been ramping up efforts to promote the bursary and get the word out, she said.
“It’s an amazing program, what they’ve got going. I really think it’s important that they get that retention for students who are interested in working rurally,” she said.
“The amount of support I’ve gotten from them — that I continue to get from them — is amazing.”
The committee also fosters a strong sense of a community bond, she said.
“For me, I knew Joanne Overguard as a nurse, and I remember thinking, ‘One day, I want to be like her',’” she said.
“It was just such a blessing for that to come full circle, and for the committee to offer that. They’re so good about encouraging me to stay in Sundre, and really making me feel important that I chose to stay in Sundre. A lot of them were nurses themselves back in the day, so they can kind of relate to the experiences of becoming a nurse, and that transition from student to full-fledged RN.”
Mifsud has no intention of going anywhere any time too soon, but she does have a long-term goal.
“I would like to work in an operating room,” she said “But I’ve actually just loved being in Sundre so much, that I am really looking forward to being there for at least the next 10 years.”
Plea for patience amid pandemic
When she embarked on her path to become a nurse four years ago, COVID-19 obviously wasn’t on her — or anyone’s — radar.
“I never thought I’d be graduating in a pandemic,” she said.
Mifsud eagerly anticipates the day in the hopefully not-too-distant future when the virus is as manageable as any other.
“I just can’t wait until it’s not a taboo thing to even say the word COVID,” she said.
But until then, she encourages everyone to exercise patience and heed the advice of medical experts.
“If we’re going to flatten this curve and get this thing under control, we have to follow these guidelines,” she said, adding that includes frequent hand washing and wearing masks.
“Sometimes, it gets tough to wear a mask all day at work. But at the same time, I know that I’m doing it to protect myself and to protect my patients,” she said.
Considering medical staff must wear masks throughout their shifts, and in some cases when spending time in an isolation room also wearing an N95 plus two masks on top of that, Mifsud struggles to understand people who won’t endure a face covering for 15 minutes at a store.
“I know it’s tough, but if we all do it, then it hopefully will give us a better outcome,” she said.
Unfortunately, not everyone is understanding, and signs have been posted throughout the hospital reminding patients that harassment is unacceptable.
Nurses are sadly no strangers to putting up with rude and unruly behaviour at the best of times, never mind during a stressful pandemic that has many people on edge.
“We get kicked and spit at and punched and yelled at — lots of stuff. We’re literally just trying our best,” she said.
“People get mad at me because I have to ask them questions that I’m literally just doing my job asking. It does get frustrating. I’m just trying to do my job, and people come into the hospital refusing to wear a mask — well, then we can’t serve them” unless they have a doctor’s note, she said.
Some patients who are placed in isolation become upset, but even if they are for example being admitted with a cough that is not related to COVID-19, they have to be kept isolated until the swabs confirm a negative test, she said.
“It’s just heavy right now. But I just find if I keep following the rules, and keep agreeing with science and evidence-based research that we know we have, then that’s pretty much all you can do,” she said.
