U of A will cut special program

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Specialized training for nurses working in the northern and isolated areas of Canada will soon be cut from the faculty of medicine at the University of Alberta.

The five month nurse practitioner program at the university will not continue after April of this year. In 1983-84, the program trained 16 nurses to deal with the special situations they will encounter when working at nursing stations in the North.

Nurses attend the program after they have a degree in nursing or are registered nurses.

In many nursing stations, such as those at Assumption, Fort Chipewyan and Fox Lake in northern Alberta, nurses to work that would normally be done by a doctor because a doctors are not available at the nursing stations on a full-time basis.

This work includes stitching cuts, delivering babies, emergency care and assessment and prescribing drugs after telephone consultation with a doctor.

Carole Little, nursing director with the nurse practitioner program said, "this is no ordinary program, this teaches people to save lives."

The reason the nurse practitioner program at the university is not being continued is because the university proposed to increase the length of the program from five to 10 months. According to Dr. Lyall Black, assistant deputy minister of medical services with Health and Welfare Canada, this would decrease the number of nurses who could be trained because the yearly funding is $214,000 for the program will not increase.

"If we went along with the university's proposal, that money would only train half as many nurses," said Dr. Black in a telephone interview.

Over the next year Health and Welfare Canada plans to give short, intensive training programs to nurses hired to work in the North who do not already have some specialized training in terms of the work they will encounter in isolated areas.

Health and Welfare Canada will also be asking universities to bid on a program similar to that of the University of Alberta, but one that will train more nurses.

Dr. Black said the turnover of nurses is high in the North and that is why the federal government does not want to spend too much money training a nurse to work in the north when she will likely move back to the city after one or two years.

Currently there is one other university program, at Dalhousie university in Nova Scotia, which specializes in training nurses to work in the North where they will not have the assistance of a doctor at all times.