Chartier hits the road to promote long term care nursing at high schools, colleges
Friday, December 15, 2006 -- Craig Anderson
Candace Chartier is visiting high schools, colleges, and universities in three LHIN regions in an effort to recruit long term care nurses and showcase careers in long term care nursing.

Chartier, project coordinator for OMNI, is focusing on schools located in LHIN regions that correspond to OMNI residences. Over the next two months, Chartier will be giving short presentations on long term care nursing to more than 25 schools spread out over central eastern, south eastern and eastern Ontario.

With a career in nursing that included work in the community, hospitals and long term care, she considers herself in a unique position to discuss the distinguishing features of long term care.

“It’s basically a focus on what opportunities exist in the long term care sector,” she says, referring to her approach for high school students looking for career options, “and I have experience in every other area of nursing as well.”

At community colleges like Algonquin College in Nepean, Loyalist in Belleville, or Sir Sanford in Peterborough, as well as larger universities, Chartier will be speaking primarily to students who are already in nursing.

The focus in these sessions, she says, will be to give advice to existing students on what classes to focus on, as well as discuss the benefits of nursing in long term care as opposed to other types of nursing.

Nurses are going to become among the most sought after staff in the health care system, says Chartier. She laments the public perception of long term care nursing as being less glamorous than other types such as working in emergency wards, a nursing position frequently focused on in fictional television shows.

“We are already finding a shortage,” says Chartier, who most recently spoke with grade ten students at Loyalist Collegiate Vocational Institute, a high school in Kingston. She says that with boomers and a generation of older nurses set to retire in the next five years recruitment and retention will become paramount.

A recent guarantee by George Smitherman, Minister of Health and Long Term Care, of employment for all trained nurses, as well as incentives such as partial payment of education costs for nurses that stay in remote or small, rural communities, should help the cause of retention, says Chartier.

Chartier is also hoping to become a “Nurse Ambassador” in the coming year. These positions, created by the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario (RNAO), will involve appointees promoting nursing at the local and regional level through workshops, speaking engagements and through attendance at conferences and career fairs.