It’s been one year since Thompson Rivers University launched its nurse practitioner program with the goal of expanding nursing education options in the province, and the past 12 months have proved there is huge demand.
The 15 available seats for the program were quickly snapped up and hundreds of people are on a waiting list.
“The interest is crazy over the top,” nursing professor Tracy Christianson said.
“We just closed our applications. We’ve had nearly 200 applications for those 15 seats, so they have been impressive and there’s definitely an interest.”
Some of that interest came from the university’s existing student body.
“We had a number of students who either started off in the master’s program knowing that NP (nurse practitioner) would be coming,” nursing dean Rani Srivastava said.
Given the ongoing staffing strain on the health-care system in Canada, TRU says it had a lot of support from the Interior Health Authority and Kamloops to bring in the program. Nurse practitioner degrees offer a wider skill set, and nurse practitioners are also able to order diagnostic tests.
Once the initial cohort is through the program, the nursing department hopes to see it expand to offer more seats.
“It’s really neat to see the breadth of opportunities our students have, whether they’re from a health-care system program through to our undergrad, in our master’s program, and now they have the NP program on board. It’s just been really exciting to see come to fruition,” Christianson said.
The university says it gives preference to Indigenous applicants or people who plan to work within Indigenous communities, along with applicants from the Interior, with the hope being that they will stay to work in the area after graduation.
“We were successful in getting the NP program because the support of our community, so it’s only fair that we look at having students who are able to access our program who are local,” Srivastava said.
“So, we’re really excited. We think they’ll stay.”