School of Nursing celebrates rich history
Students in program launched 50 years ago affectionately know as ‘blue birds’
Fifty years ago, Saskatchewan shifted nurse training from hospital-based programs to a collegebased program in Saskatoon.
Faculty, students and alumni gathered Saturday to mark the School of Nursing’s 50th anniversary.
On Sept. 11, 1967 the first class of 250 students in a two-year nursing diploma program registered at the Saskatchewan Institute of Applied Arts and Sciences (now called Saskatchewan Polytechnic).
The students still did part of their training on-site in the city’s three hospitals.
They came to be known as the “blue birds” because of their blue uniforms, recalls Elaine Hope, one of the original students.
“The patients used to say ‘we love the blue birds,’” she recounted.
Hope was among the attendees at Saturday’s anniversary celebration, one of close to a dozen original students at the gathering.
“We were the pioneers,” she recalled.
Because of the change “we felt that we had to fight for ourselves and that made us stronger people and stronger nurses I think,” Hope explained.
The present-day Saskatchewan Polytechnic campus was still under construction when the program started. Hope recalls having some of their classes in a furnace room. Other classes were at St. Andrew’s College on the U of S campus.
They also went to Prince Albert, Yorkton and North Battleford to do their rotations “because there was such a large number, it was not like the hospital-based programs, they couldn’t accommodate all of us, so we had to go to other facilities as well,” she continued.
Hope went on to work in Provost, Alberta ( just across the Saskatchewan border from Macklin) where she taught childbirth education classes for 30 years. She then went into nursing administration before retiring in 2004.
Mary Yaremchuk (née Kinnaird) remembers being a farm girl unused to getting around the city when she joined that first cohort.
Her career has taken her through many different jobs and locations, including director of care at the nursing home in Shellbrook for 11 years. She now works casual in the ICU in Red Deer, Alta.
Yaremchuk says the nursing program got her used to diversity, “diversity in adapting to being in all the different places that we had to go to.”
Dean Netha Dyck notes in particular the college’s blend of on-site training with classes in simulated environments at the college.
“So through the integration of advanced technology and development of different teaching and learning strategies, our students are learning their clinical skills and their critical thinking skills in a very real and safe environment, where they’re working with mannequins and not with live patients,” Dyck explained.
Since its inception 50 years ago, there has been continual new program development and expansion of existing programming, integration of new technologies, development of new teaching and learning strategies, and curriculum changes, Dyck noted.
She says today it’s the only educational institution in Saskatchewan that spans the entire field of nursing. It has expanded from registered nursing to practical nursing, psychiatric nursing, nurse practitioner and specialty areas such as perioperative, critical care, emergency, occupational health and diabetes education.
“We have prepared tens of thousands of caring and competent graduates to practice in all of those areas,” Dyck said.
There is also a program to help nurses trained in other countries to transition to practice here in Saskatchewan.
Meanwhile, faculty engage in research and scholarship.
Some have developed apps that are now used at the School of Nursing. The “instrumentor” is used in the perioperative nursing program as well as the medical device reprocessing technician program. It has all the instruments that are used in surgery, presented in 3D. There is also an audio pronunciation guide.
Another app delivers online student evaluation and feedback.
Several steps have been taken to make nursing education accessible across the province: through online education, video conferencing and “brokering” programs through regional colleges — so that training is offered through 18 different sites in all.
There is also growing diversity in the student population: 260 or about 12 per cent are now indigenous.
The school is establishing a Legacy Trust Fund for scholarships and bursaries.
A specially-designed Hillberg & Berk bracelet is being sold (priced at $147.83), with proceeds going to the trust fund.