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NNSL photo

Kerri Henderson has her blood pressure tested by Nancy Parril and Michelle Pitcher during Nurses Week in Iqaluit on the second week of May.

Nurses needed

John Thompson
Northern News Services

Iqaluit (May 23/05) - Michele Martel spent her first two weeks as a nurse crying after her shift.

Sexual abuse, drug problems and suicide attempts bring patients tumbling to where she works at the Baffin Regional Hospital in Iqaluit. For someone fresh out of school like Martel when she arrived last October, the experience was overwhelming.

"We can't begin to understand how difficult it is," Martel said, talking about her patients. Since then she's learned to take her job in stride and says the experience she's gained is irreplaceable.

"You can go from a suicidal patient to an ecstatic mother who's just had a baby," she said.

Nurses week came and went recently, but the challenges Nunavut faces recruiting and retaining nurses here remain.

There are 184 nursing positions across Nunavut, with 163 of them filled by long-term employees.

The rest are agency nurses, paid higher wages to work short-term, temporary contracts. Sixty nurses work in Iqaluit.

With a nursing shortage looming across Canada, the Nunavut government has directed efforts towards recruiting overseas, as well as back home, said Health and Social Services Minister Levinia Brown.

International recruiting has drawn nurses from the Philippines and Australia to Nunavut. Another two nursing students will graduate from Arctic College this summer, adding on last summer's first two graduates.

Brown acknowledged nursing levels remain inadequate.

"It's always been understood," she said.

The current shortage means nurses like Martel typically work an extra 12-hour shift every two weeks.

Surrogate doctors

Outside Iqaluit, nurses must step up to the usual responsibilities of doctors in communities where there often are none.

Grise Fiord remains Nunavut's sole community with a single-nurse health station. Pat Cross, who has worked there intermittently since 2001, says when she needs an extra set of hands, she asks the janitor or clerk to grab her supplies or help watch a baby. She hopes one day single-nurse stations will be history.

"It'd be nice to not always be on call, to have a life," she said.

Worthwhile

For Martel, moments when she can cheer up someone on the edge and make them smile make her job worthwhile. So does the knowledge she draws from experienced co-workers who do stay.

"I can always rely on someone who's lived it, breathed it. There's always someone who knows," she said.