Nurses share experience through mentoring

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Native and Inuit nursing students in British Columbia are benefiting from a mentoring program offered by the provincial Native and Inuit Nurses Association (NINA).

Nursing students are matched with NINA members, who act as role models providing guidance and support during their studies.

Indigo Sweetwater is president of NINA BC. She said that, although mentoring has been part of what NINA does since the organization was founded just over a decade ago, the formal mentoring program began in the past 12 months.

Right now 17 students are matched with mentors through the program, but that number will be increasing when the new school year starts in the fall.

"The way it works is that we're, as the Native and Inuit Nurses Association, the only Aboriginal professional nursing association in B.C. We're very aware of which colleges, which universities, are running access programs for Native students. Or, if we're very lucky, we're aware of where the Native students are," Sweetwater said.

Much of the information about where the students are comes from counsellors or advisors who deal with Native students, as well as from NINA members themselves.

"I think all of us as members of NINA try in our own areas, wherever we are from in B.C. There's not too many Native students who are going to nursing programs in B.C. that we don't know about," she said.

"And so we approach them, just to let them know that we have a mentoring program, and that it is available to them, and then explain to them what the mentoring program is. Because a lot of people don't understand what the word 'mentoring' is, and they think, 'Oh, this is another way to access funding', or this is another way to access, you know, all kinds of different things. And we're like, 'No, this is like a buddy system, this is like a peer support, this is like an esteem booster program.'"

Sweetwater said Aboriginal nursing students are quite often not 18 or 19 when they go into nursing. Quite often they are mature students, and in their 30s and 40s.

"Quite often they are single parents. Mostly they're female. And quite often they have a burden of all their life's baggage with them."

She said many are dealing with raising their families, or they have come out of an abusive relationship, or have worked through substance abuse problems.

"Sometimes copings skills, how to deal with their money, how to get money-because lots of them are funded by the bands, but they don't know how to make it work, like getting all that money at the first of the year, or the first of the semester, is hard. So our mentors do end up in an advisory role sometimes, with some of the students, to help them sort of figure out monetary things. Or to figure out how to study, or 'do I need to hire a tutor, or do I need to spend that money on a computer. Do I need to learn how to use that computer program, because I'll never make it through statistics if I don't.' You know, those are real sort of nuts and bolts of it."

So far, the mentoring program has been successful with the support offered often as simple as helping students to better organize their efforts.

"Sometimes it's a matter of saying, "Look, what is your interest? . . . Pick something . . . do all your research on that. Write all our papers on it, in all your courses. Sometimes it's a matter of suggesting to the student that they do that, because they're running all over the place with this idea, and that idea, and they're not organized in their thought patterns," she said.

Each mentor and each student will something different to the program.

"Some people are working in community health. Some of our members are working in acute care. Some are working in rural and remote. You know, they're doing primary care, nurse practitioner stuff. And some are working straight academic, educational. You know, like some are nursing instructors. So they each bring their own sort of bent to it."

NINA initiatives aim to increase the number of Abriginal nurses working in the province.

"That has been a real goal for us to work toward here in B.C., because there's a nursing shortage everywhere, and there's certainly a nursing shortage in our Native communities. It's really hard to keep nurses in our Native communities, whether the nurses are Native or non-Native," she said.

"Our focus is to get out into the very rural, very remote Native communities and target the children, as young as in Grade 6. Because if you're going to go into nursing, if you're going to go into sciences, if you're going to go into a health career field, you've got to have that background. It's really hard, that's the one thing that we've noticed with our students, it's really hard for them to get that biology and chemistry and physics later on. If you're thinking about nursing, or if you've never thought about nursing, that's the time to grab someone's attention, is to take in some of our Native nurses, and use them as role models, and go 'Hey, nursing is a great life, and nursing can provide you, perhaps, with some of the things that you're looking for, whether it be autonomy, or whatever,'" she said.

Nursing is a wonderful career, said Sweetwater. "You can nurse on the reserve, off the reserve, in the hospital in the city. You can nurse on a cruise ship. You can be a medi-vac nurse on a plane. I mean, the sky's the limit. You can be a teacher. You can be a researcher, whatever. Go for it."

For more information about NINA, or information about the mentoring program, contact Indigo Sweetwater at 250-851-8889, or by e-mail at indigosweetwater@telus.net.