Now is the right time to be a nursing student.
By 2016 there will be more opportunities than ever for young nurses to get their foot in the door of the health care industry, thanks to retiring Baby Boomer nurses. If you are thinking about a career in nursing or have just started your bachelor, by the time you graduate you will be one of the most in-demand graduates in Canada.
Where the jobs are: community and specialties
According to the president of the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions, Linda Silas, nurses working currently have filled over 12,000 full-time equivalent positions just in overtime work, representing an immense shortage of registered nurses in the system.
Most of these shortages are in specialist occupations and community nursing outside of hospitals. This trend is due in part to Canada’s aging population and the changing demographics of hospital patients.
“We’re certainly seeing a trend to shorter, more intense hospital stays for very, very acutely ill people,” says Kathleen MacMillan, director of the Dalhousie University School of Nursing. “More people are coming in for day surgery and recuperating at home, so you need a community nurse to come in and make sure that they are recovering.”
It used to be that 70 to 80 percent of nurses were concentrated in hospitals, MacMillan says, but now nurses are everywhere. Their role has been “rebalanced to show equally a focus on sick people and on nursing the well, and making sure that we keep them well.”
With more seniors entering Canada’s health care system, MacMillan says that they are encouraging students to look into long-term care and gerontology. “It may not necessarily be institutional,” she says. “It may be geriatric daycare or community visiting to do with the frail elderly. It’s not an area that people normally think about, but it can be a really rewarding area where expert nurses can really make a difference to people’s independence and family care burden.”
According to Silas, the idea of the “visiting nurse” is also more in-demand, where nurses visit patients in their home for follow-ups related to chronic disease or preventative care. She also stresses the importance of nurses working in mental health and the benefits they can have for the community.
As a nurse, you can also look into population, rather than individual, care. Public health nurses have spearheaded initiatives such as increasing the use of bike helmets and informing the public on the dangers of leaving children unattended in baby walkers. They also work with governments on policy issues.
If community work isn’t for you, there are more specialized positions that are projected to experience labour shortages. MacMillan cites shortages of nurses working in mental health, cancer and perioperative care (working with patients undergoing operations and other invasive procedures), as well as in emergency. However, nurses working in these fields are traditionally not fresh graduates, she says, “because people generally didn’t get into critical care, for example, until they’d had some experience, so demographically the people who are in the specialty areas are older and will be retiring sooner.” She notes that new grads will likely need post-graduate education in order to have the right skills to fill these specialty positions.
“Different specialties are like taking a different job in nursing,” Silas says, which is one of the reasons she thinks nurses are lucky to have so many options.
Specialization and advancement options
If you’re thinking about entering critical care or another specialized area, you should expect to require some post-graduate education.
You can gain certification for various specialities through a variety of different avenues: the Canadian Nurses Association offers certification exams for emergency, perinatal, occupational health, community health, critical care pediatrics, perianesthesia and gerontology, among others. Colleges, universities and teaching hospitals also offer certification courses.
Planning your career path while doing your bachelor’s degree can help a lot with entering the field, says MacMillan. Talk to faculty about doing as many varied placements as possible, as well as where you can do those placements, as they can add substantially to your background experience.
Nurses should also think about working in a rural community to gain wider experience and boost their job prospects. “In rural communities, often you get a much broader experience and you get to do more things than you do in an urban centre,” MacMillan says. For example, nurses could work in the emergency room, obstetrics, and out-patient surgery—all in the same week.
If you want to go even further in your education, you can complete a master’s degree. Nurses with a master’s can go into nursing management and administration, take on senior executive positions in care organizations, and become Clinical Nurse Specialists, or Nurse Practitioners. Clinicians are often consultants with specialized knowledge for the care of certain diseases or techniques, while the nurse practitioner spans the roles of physician and nurse, ordering tests and prescribing medications for patients.
After your master’s degree, you could go on to get your PhD in nursing, leading to a career in research or education. MacMillan is keen to get more students to consider a career in academia. “We’re concerned about nursing faculty, because like everybody else, the faculty are aging and we’re concerned about supplies of people to teach nursing,” she says.
MacMillan says there is a push to get students straight through their education if they think they’ll have an interest in nursing academics. “We used to encourage [nurses to work in the field before getting their doctorate] because our perception was that people really needed a strong practice background, but what we find is that people get used to a paycheque and then they’re less likely to come back,” she laughs.
While entry-level nursing faculty are not always as well paid as registered nurses, MacMillan thinks that students should consider the option. “If you’re really passionate about research and scholarship, you’d be happier here than you would be at practice, so I think it’s choosing what fits for you.” She notes that benefits for full-time faculty are very good, and competitive at the senior levels.
Advice for aspiring nurses
“I can tell anybody that’s thinking about nursing, if you’re getting it from television, you’re getting a pretty skewed view of the universe,” MacMillan says. “So most of our students come in here thinking that they are going to put on the white shoes and the stethoscope and work in the emergency department, and that’s a very small aspect of the job.”
This romanticized view of nursing is something that young nurses should get out of their head.
“If you don’t like old people, nursing is probably going to be a little bit difficult for you, because when you look at who gets sick in our country today, it’s often the frail elderly, it’s the people with a lot of different health challenges, the people that have mental health conditions,” she says. “You have to have a passion for wanting to help people be the best they can be and be the healthiest they can be, and work with them.”
But for new graduates looking for a way in, there are plenty of opportunities both inside and outside the common perception of nursing.
“Whether you’re a young man or a young woman who’s considering a career [in nursing], do a little bit of research and find out where nurses are and what they’re doing,” MacMillan says. “I think people will be surprised at the various career options that come out of having a nursing background. You know, whether they want to be an academic, or they want to be an administrator, or you want to be a policy maker or a public health professional—these are all things that a nursing education can be a way into.”
Nursing by the numbers:
- 7 to 9: Percentage of male nurses
- $41,000 to $86,000: Salary range—depending on experience, location and specialization
- 25%: Increase of available seats in nursing programs in 2005
- 32: Nursing master’s programs in Canada
- 15: Nursing doctoral programs in Canada
