Alumnae Association of the Royal Victoria Hospital Training School for Nurses Scholarship

I have been a registered nurse for ten years. My practice has been primarily in the emergency department (ED), with a year-long foray into ICU nursing at the peak of the covid pandemic and a year of medical evacuation nursing in northern Quebec and western Labrador. 

Working across these distinct fields one thing became crystal clear to me – Canadians urgently need primary care providers (PCPs).  

In the ED I encountered countless patients forced to wait hours to have simple health problems addressed because they lacked primary care. These patients would return over and over, denied the consistency of regular follow-up as a result of a system that is starved for PCPs. In the ICU some patients would undoubtedly have avoided admission had they had access to PCPs to manage their chronic health conditions. And in the North, where we routinely medevaced patients out of their communities to receive essential care that is accessible in close proximity for most Canadians, the scarcity of PCPs was starkly obvious. 

When I decided to further my nursing career by becoming a nurse practitioner, these experiences compelled me to pursue the primary care stream. I love caring for patients, I love solving problems and preventing new ones. And I believe very strongly in shared-decision making in health care. Patients are the authors of their health. Having regular, accessible primary care gives them the tools to write their best stories.