UBC nursing is permanently adding 30 seats to its program after the province announced increased funding for nursing programs province-wide.
There are a total of 602 seats added across the province for nursing, which currently has approximately 2000 nursing seats, according to the province's press release. There is a total of $96 million in provincial funding allocated to healthcare education and workforce capacity capacity for the workforce over the next three years.
The province said that new seats will help healthcare assistants to train as licensed practical nurses (LPN) and assist LPNs that want to transition to registered nurses (RN).
The expansion will result in a thirty per cent increase in undergraduate nursing spots in BC. Last year, with initial funding from the province, UBC’s program added eight seats. It will increase admissions by adding another 22 this year.
Dr. Elizabeth Saewyc, director of the school of nursing at UBC, said the expansion of nursing seats will help address problems with healthcare in the province.
Saewyc said there’s a “worldwide shortage of nurses and some of that has to do with even before the pandemic.”
Factors contributing to the shortage are extensive: longer-living populations, unsafe working environments, early retirements, people leaving the profession and failures to implement regulated patient-to-staff ratios.
“There's no point in educating, you know, fabulous nurses, only to have them leave the profession way too soon because the work environment is impossible,” Saewyc said.
Dr. Farinaz Havaei is an RN and assistant professor at UBC that specializes in occupational health and safety, as well as quality and safety of patient delivery.
While she thinks “this expansion is going to help,” she agreed with Saewyc’s analysis and said shortages have been going on for a decade.
Havaei cited a study in 2012 that showed “we’re going to be about 60,000 full-time nurses short in Canada by 2022. That study did not really consider the impact of the pandemic.”
She said that adequate staffing is often a factor in addressing the working environments of nurses. However, “nursing leadership, organizational culture, having clear roles and responsibilities for team members” are other considerations.
While increasing the number of nurses is an integral part of improving healthcare in the province, nurse placements are also scarce.
“At the moment, the system is really stretched. And the idea of expanding about [30] per cent in terms of… the number of students in the system means we have to increase the number of clinical placements,” Saewyc said.
UBC Vancouver’s approach to this problem involves integrating simulations into the program, which provides experience to students earlier and increase preparation and skills before clinical placements begin.
The increase in undergraduate students also means there is more need for nurse educators. “We have an even deeper shortage of graduate prepared nurse educators throughout Canada,” Saewyc said.
She noted that while the province hasn’t explicitly identified expanding nurse educator programs, they are working on preparing more.
One way to improve the work environment is to change staffing ratios to be a regulated part of health care. According to Saewyc, current guidelines in BC for staff to patient ratios are “chronically not met.” By regulating ratios, Saewyc said, “you actually have happier staff and better quality care and the time for patients.”
Another factor she said that improves the workplace is access to mental health supports.
Havaei echoed this while highlighting the need to address workloads. Two 2020 studies she produced showed that ineffective workload management was one of the top predictors “of nurses’ mental health, and nurses ability to deliver quality and safe patient care.”
This article has been updated. A previous version incorrectly cited a 2020 study from Dr. Farinaz Havaei.