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Northern nurses want six-week training course

Qualified nurse practitioners could improve health care

JANE GEORGE

Newly hired nurses should get a six-week course before they start practicing in Nunavut or the NWT to give them the community health skills they need in the North, the Canadian Nursing Association said last week.

"Bad care costs people money. Above all, it hurts people," said Lucille Auffrey, executive director of the Canadian Nurses Association.

Auffrey was in Iqaluit last week for a meeting of the newly-formed Registered Nursing Association of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut.

A resolution passed at last week's meeting calls for all nurses in the NWT and Nunavut to complete, "at a bare minimum," an "Introduction to Nurse Practitioner" course.

This course could also lead to an increase in the number of nurse practitioners, which is that association's second main goal.

These nurse practitioner can suture, apply casts, do X-rays, draw blood, and prescribe medicine.

As it stands now, nurses have to follow what's called a "script," which spells out what they can do for a patient, and stops them from prescribing medicine.

"If you have a kid with a sore ear and he weighs this much and he's this age you can give him this much of this... anything outside that, then they have to call the doctor," said Barb Round, the executive director of the territorial association.

A nurse practitioner, however, can handle many more things outside of this script.

The CNA's goal is to register 10,000 new nurse practitioners across Canada over the next 10 years.

The association would like to have designated positions in the territories for these more qualified nurse practitioners.

"There are nurses who go into health centres and they do eventually learn those skills, but they often learn them under fire and it's not the ideal situation. If all the nurses had a basic package of information, they would work more comfortably, they would work more efficiently, and they would give better service to clients," said Round.

In Nunavut, where community nurses shoulder a heavy load of responsibility, patients may not receive the quality of care they should and, as a result, their health may suffer.

Due to lack of money, there's pressure to scrimp on nursing, even though studies link higher death rates and increases in some health problems to lower numbers of nurses.

Understaffing is an "ill-conceived strategy to keep costs low," Auffrey says.

Providing an environment where nurses can offer safe, ethical, competent care also makes it easier to keep and find nurses, she said.

Nurses now remain on the average in Nunavut for 2.5 years. Nunavut Arctic College offers a nursing program, but, so far, there have been only two graduates, and it will take many years before local nurses can fill all the nursing requirements in Nunavut.

Distance education opportunities, including the "Introduction to Nurse Practitioner" course, were also discussed in Iqaluit.

"We need to promote this for the nurses, so that nurses themselves have the expectation that they would do better and perform more safely if they had additional training," Round said.

Nurses in Rankin Inlet, Cape Dorset, Kugluktuk, Baker Lake and Arctic Bay were linked up to the meeting in Iqaluit via the tele-health video-conferencing network.

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