Canadians eager to be nurses facing tougher entry requirements, fewer training spots

Nursing has been Hannah DeVries's dream profession, she says, since birth. It's also a family calling: her two sisters are registered nurses working in intensive care units, while her mom is an RN for stroke patients.

"I've known since forever that this is what I wanted to do," explained the college student, who kicked off her first year at Seneca's campus in King City, Ont., this September.

"[The pandemic] just gave me a desire to get into it as fast as I can. To come and help out the people, the nurses, because they're struggling." 

Before COVID-19, there was already a serious shortage of nurses across Canada. Perennially, there's also been stiff competition for acceptance into post-secondary nursing programs. However, the pandemic has underlined the need to ramp up the number of nurses in training — often in creative and new ways — in order to help tackle critical demand in the workforce.

DeVries is aware just how many others are equally keen about her dream job. "It was extremely difficult to get in: you have to have top grades … The competition was really tough," she noted. 

Her classmate Badeer Masri echoed that sentiment, sharing his belief that many high schoolers received inflated marks from pandemic learning, which in turn raised the entrance averages different post-secondary programs determined from student applications. 

"Everyone had better grades because it was online … [which] made universities and colleges' acceptance rate harder as well," he said.

As a mature student with a 3.74 GPA after more than a year studying nursing at the University of British Columbia's Okanagan campus, Melissa Philp had hoped to transfer into the University of Calgary's condensed bachelor of nursing program following her family's recent move to Alberta.

"It was quite heartbreaking when I didn't get in."

Philp thinks a significant increase in the grade-point average of incoming students is the main reason her application was waitlisted, then rejected.

The mother of two young kids, aged seven and 18 months old, she's now resumed work as a medical office assistant on a casual basis, juggling work with child care and enrolling in new remote learning courses. She's preparing to reapply for nursing school.  

"It's a whole other year that I need to go do more upgrading to get my marks higher … To get my GPA up essentially from an A- to an A+," she said.

Nursing has long been a popular area of study, said Nora MacLachlan, dean of health and community studies at Calgary's Bow Valley College. Motivated applicants to the school's practical nursing diploma program, for instance, sometimes waited close to a year — if not longer — to get in even before the pandemic, she said.

The solution isn't as easy as just accepting more students, especially since COVID-19 has made a serious dent in one vital part of nursing education: practicum placements in hospitals and other health-care settings.