Education/training | Making Connections | Personal Advancement | Self-employment | Career Options

Education/training

York offers lifeline to foreign-trained nurses

Engineers driving taxis. Physicists tending bar. Doctors loading trucks. Nurses cleaning hotel rooms. The plight -- and waste of talent -- of these highly trained newcomers to Canada is so widespread that everyone knows or has met someone who's in that particular fix.

DAVID CHILTON

[ 2006-01-25 ]

Send to a friend

Fortunately, help for some professionals trained abroad has arrived. Among the newest programs is York University's 20-month course that puts registered nurses from overseas in line for registration in Ontario and thus allows them to work as an RN in the province.

Sue Coffey, assistant professor at York's School of Nursing and the co-ordinator of the BScN for Internationally Educated Nurses at the Toronto university, says the chance to help foreign nurses already in Canada was an opportunity not to be missed. It was a good fit with York's international perspective, says Coffey, who emphasizes the program is designed for those already here rather than a tool to encourage nurses to come to Canada.

"We put in a proposal last year, in the fall, to create a bridging program to educate nurses who were educated in other countries but who are no longer eligible to write the registration exam in Ontario," Coffey says.

That's because starting in January last year all new registered nurses in the province must have a nursing degree, a qualification that most countries still don't confer on their nurses. "For many nurses the bar is suddenly higher," Coffey says. "And for many nurses who have an education that would be equivalent to our old diploma but not equivalent to a BScN, there are some issues of access to educational programs that will lead to writing the registration exam."

Coffey says the first group of 32 nurses started at York last April with 30 of them graduating this December. (One student couldn't complete the bridging program and another completed her pre-qualifying session, had her credentials reassessed by the College of Nurses and was thus able to write her registration exam).

A second group of 36 is scheduled to start the program, which runs uninterrupted, in November. Tuition costs $10,000.

In the first batch of students, there are nurses from Nigeria, Poland, Turkey, Somalia, China and elsewhere. One of them is Shohreh Eghbali, who was a nurse for five years in Iran before coming to Canada to give her children the chance of a better life. Eghbali spent four years working as a packing operator in Oakville, just to survive, and she can barely contain her enthusiasm for Coffey and the program. She says she was "so excited" when she learned she'd been accepted at York because she felt she had wasted five years of her life in Canada.

NEW BSCN RULES

One of Eghbali's classmates is Masha Nikitsina, who spent 11 years as a nurse in Belarus, a small country in Europe bordered mostly by Russia and Ukraine. Nikitsina says she didn't know about the new BScN rules when she came here in 2003, but was determined to become a nurse anyway. "I'm pretty stubborn. When I start something I like to finish (it)."

A third student in the group is Jie Lu, from China, who came to Canada in 2004. She too was a nurse for 11 years back home, and, like Eghbali, can't say enough about the bridging program.

Here, Lu says, professors put their "heart and soul" into teaching and they emphasize patient care. That approach has obviously impressed Lu -- in China the stress is on high marks and passing exams -- who wants to take the Canadian way into medical-surgical nursing, her field before she emigrated.

---