The president of Université de Moncton says the best way to quickly increase the number of nursing grads in New Brunswick would be to eliminate tuition fees for four-year bachelor of nursing programs in the province.
“In my opinion there could be a very effective way to increase the number of candidates for nursing programs, which is to not have tuition fees,” U de M president Denis Prud’homme told the a legislative committee earlier this week.
Prud’homme also criticized the government’s decision to provide grants for New Brunswick students who enrol in the bachelor of nursing program at Beal University in Maine. The program provides $6,000 grants for up to 100 New Brunswick students who enrol in the program, with the condition that they work in the province once they’ve completed their studies.
Prud’homme said that the money would be better spent on bolstering the programs at the province’s public universities.
“It is investing in the U.S. rather than investing in our own institutions and this money could have been invested in UNB so they could increase their capacity,” he said. “This funding would have had positive impacts to eliminate waitlists and what is needed is additional resources to increase their capacity to have more graduates.”
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The president of the University of New Brunswick, Paul Mazerolle, told the committee on Wednesday that the university is accepting as many students as it can at the moment, due to the cost of clinical education required by the program as well as a limited number of available placements within the healthcare and long term care sectors.
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“We don’t want to leave nursing students on the table, we’re taking as many as we can. In fact, we’re probably taking more than we can afford,” Mazerolle said.
Both UNB and U de M receive performance based funding from the government based on how many nurses they graduate. Each graduate over a certain floor provides the universities with $35,000. Mazerolle said that will start to pay dividends soon, but means that the university is currently losing money for each student they accept. He expects that will change as the univerity adapts to the new funding formula.
“As we increase the intake of students, as we graduate more nurses we will be financially rewarded as an institution which will allow us to take on more students,” he said.
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