The funds are set so as to add greater than 600 classroom seats to nursing bridging and licensure applications
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Alberta’s UCP authorities is spending $15.1 million in its upcoming finances because it seems to be so as to add extra foreign-trained nurses to the province’s struggling well being workforce.
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The funds are set to develop a pupil support scholarship for the internationally skilled nurses, and so as to add greater than 600 classroom seats to nursing bridging and licensure applications, Superior Schooling Minister Demetrios Nicolaides introduced Monday.
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The brand new classroom seating might be added over three years starting within the upcoming 2023–2024 tutorial yr, an growth with a $7.3 million price ticket. In Calgary, this consists of 256 new seats for a registered nurse bridging program at Mount Royal College, and 120 seats for a licensed sensible nurse program at Bow Valley Faculty.
As properly, $7.8 million in annual, non-repayable scholarships are earmarked for internationally skilled nurses getting into these applications, with recipients eligible for as a lot as $30,000 over 5 years to cowl their licensure charges, tuition and residing bills, together with from the 2023- 24 tutorial years. The minimal scholarship is about at $8,000.
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A 3rd occasion distributes these funds on behalf of Alberta Scholar Help. These awarded the scholarship will full a yr of nursing in Alberta for each $6,000 in funds disbursed to them.
Well being care system points come again to employee shortages: minister
The funding is the newest in a sequence of current strikes by the UCP authorities geared toward rising pupil enrollments in sectors dealing with a labor disaster, significantly round healthcare. Final week, the province prolonged funding to a different nursing scholarship for low-income college students.
“I believe it’s a duty of the federal government to take a look at the event of options, short-term and long-term, that can assist to deal with these challenges,” Nicolaides advised Postmedia on Monday.
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“Once we take a look at the challenges we expertise in our well being care system, plenty of it comes again to workforce and lack of accessible workforce… We now have internationally skilled nurses which are right here within the province, and they aren’t in a position to carry out at their full talent stage to apply, both due to value limitations or due to the dearth of availability of bridging applications.”
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The Monday announcement additionally fulfills a part of a memorandum of understanding signed final yr between the governments of Alberta and the Philippines meant to encourage Filipino nurses to immigrate to the province for work. Nonetheless, Nicolaides stated the brand new applications would haven’t any restrictions on the nation of origin.
He described accreditation and bridging for international nurses as one shorter-term answer to healthcare shortages, saying whereas timelines for getting into the workforce fluctuate primarily based on expertise and talent stage.
“In the event that they’re assessed to be as much as a Canadian normal, they’ll get to work fairly rapidly,” Nicolaides stated. “Oftentimes that occurs in a matter of months, whereas it clearly takes a number of years to coach a brand new nurse from a post-secondary standpoint with somebody simply coming in from highschool.”
Extra to return…
jherring@postmedia.com
Twitter: @jasonfherring
