>They’re the ones that carry you to a bed on a wooden board after you’ve put a foot wrong on the halfpipe. They’re the ones that strip off your heavy snowpants to examine a leg broken during a failed attempt at a cork 9. They’re the ones who administer your bandages after you’ve haphazardly skied into a tree.
>They’re nurses, and this is their week.
>May 12-18 has been designated National Nursing Week by the Canadian Nursing Association (CNA). Nurses across the country are being encouraged to show Canadians the “wide scope of nursing,” according to the CNA website. It also asks people to challenge their perceptions of the role of nurses in the Canadian health system.
>Much is happening to commemorate the occasion in British Columbia. Provincial health minister George Abbott has proclaimed May 13 as “Licensed Practical Nurses Day” to recognize the contributions made by nurses to health care in communities throughout the province.
>“Since 2001, the number of licensed practical nurses in B.C. has increased by more than 42 per cent to 6,741,” he said in a news release. “Licensed practical nurses are integral members of healthcare teams across B.C. and declaring a day in their honour allows us to recognize the important work licensed practical nurses do every day to help ensure that we meet the healthcare needs of British Columbians.”
>Elsewhere, nurses are spending Nursing Week immersed in political action. The B.C. Nurses’ Union (BCNU) is organizing a postcard campaign to Premier Gordon Campbell to advocate for nurses’ rights to be involved in patient care.
>BCNU members will be receiving a letter from president Debra McPherson that describes a campaign to address overcrowding in the health care system. The letter will include a postcard addressed to the Premier.
>The union is also holding its second annual Nursing Week conference from May 15-16 at the Four Seasons Hotel in downtown Vancouver. Speakers will include Surrey North MP Penny Priddy, a former B.C. Minister of Health.
>Further north, the Whistler Health Care Centre (WHCC) is celebrating Nursing Week by recognizing the work of its own nurses internally.
>Anne Townley, Clinical Services Coordinator at the WHCC, has set up a posterboard and banner for the nurses and put up a series of pictures of the nurses working. She’ll also be giving out gift certificates donated by the physicians at the WHCC.
>A nurse who’s been in Whistler since 1982, Townley hopes that people take the time to recognize the work that nurses do for Whistler residents year-round.
>“We are a very strong team of nurses, doctors, and the rest of the team at the health care centre,” she said in an interview. “There's an average six-year wait to get a permanent position because we've got such a strong team and we really enjoy working here, and it's very rewarding.”
>The nurses working at the WHCC have been there for anywhere between four and 30 years, according to Townley. The Centre also regularly hosts students just starting their careers.
>One of Whistler’s veteran nurses is Janet Hamer, who reluctantly started her career 32 years ago in a very different time for the nursing profession.
>“I had done a year of university and I was looking for something where it was fairly flexible,” she says. “You could do it anywhere in the world and you got a reasonable rate of pay.”
>Leading up to her time in nursing school at Ryerson Polytechnic in Toronto, she vowed she would never become a nurse after seeing her mother go down that path.
>“I grew up swearing I was never, ever going to be a nurse,” she said.
>Hamer didn’t have an easy start in her chosen profession. She did not enjoy her time at Ryerson and says she never went to class unless it was absolutely necessary.
>“I hated nursing school,” she says. “Student nurses are slave labour and they get the worst jobs because you think you’re learning something.”
>Things didn’t get much better for her when she finished. She graduated from the Ryerson program in 1976 and there were no jobs for nurses in Canada. Following that revelation she went to a job fair and had her interest sparked by opportunities in Texas and Florida.
>She planned to choose “whoever got me a visa first, didn’t care what the job was.”
>Hamer eventually settled on an opportunity in Miami, Florida at a private children’s hospital. There, she worked in the intensive care unit (ICU), where she would help take care of newborns.
>She loved her job, having worked at a time when changes were coming to hospitals that gave premature newborns a better chance at life.
>“They did a really good job of mentoring,” Hamer says. “It was very, very interesting. Because it was an intensive care unit and you got to see all sorts of trauma and medical things come through.”
>Eventually, she began to miss the Canadian seasons and sought an opportunity up north. That desire brought her to Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, where she worked in the ICU unit for seven years doing jobs such as infant transport, looking after newborns from smaller community hospitals that could not take care of them.
>She worked at the Hospital for Sick Children for seven years before finding her way to Whistler, where she initially planned to do some skiing. 19 years later, she’s still there.
>“My husband and I came out to be ski bums, and we just stayed,” she says. “We came for two seasons, and then when the snow fell on the third year we just came back and stayed, and this is a wonderful, wonderful place to be a nurse.”
>The WHCC plays host to students doing what’s called a “final practicum,” where they earn 300 hours of work experience before they graduate. Given the students she’s seen herself, Hamer says that positive changes have come to nursing education in Canada.
>“For the most part they’re well-informed, and they’re critical thinkers, and they’re good, safe nurses,” she said. “Critical thinking was not something that happened 30 years ago.”
>“People whose families maybe raised them to be critical thinkers were, but that terminology was not out there. It was very utilitarian, the only learning format that there was… was lecturing.”
>Vancouver-raised Tim Pulfrey, meanwhile, was recently given a permanent position with the WHCC in the fall.
>He came to the nursing profession after a previous career as a logger in the Kootenays for a company that cut a few too many corners.
>“I was watching my friends getting maimed and killed and I figured getting an education wasn’t such a bad idea,” he said. “It was a fantastic job, I loved it, but it was dangerous as hell and being young and full of testosterone I got myself into some situations as well that I was lucky to get out of intact.”
>One of those situations was when he rolled a skidder, a powerful machine that’s used for pulling cut trees out of a forest.
>“I walked away. Well-placed horseshoes,” he says today.
>Pulfrey’s inspiration to be a nurse came from a number of early influences, among them the mother of a friend while in high school who could relate to the experiences of teens growing up. A nurse he met while involved in dragon boat racing also inspired him. Like himself, she had previously been an athlete, and she inspired him to seek work up north.
>Nursing school, however, proved to be a challenge, having found himself in the minority of male students while attending Camosun College and the University of Victoria. Less than 10 per cent of his class was made up of males.
>“It was bonding for the guys, and certainly a challenge at times to work within the whole feminist perspective that was really getting pushed at the time,” he said.
>“Even the literature, instead of having he, it was all she, she, she, everything was focused around the woman and the womanly qualities that they were trying to promote, things that men weren’t supposed to have in such supply… It was a challenge and sometimes it was even affronting.”
>After graduating in 1999, Pulfrey says that it wasn’t the last of his experiences that he felt would single him out as a male in a largely female profession.
>For one of his practicums he found himself paired up with an experienced nurse who challenged him on every one of his decisions.
>“My feelings were that perhaps she wasn’t keen on having men in nursing, but that might have just been a chip on my shoulder.”
>The profession has nevertheless been rewarding for him. He recalls one instance where he helped deliver a co-worker’s baby.
>The experience was an “eye opener,” he says, and he found himself excited and nervous as he helped her.
>“She was a nurse as well, but she was totally fine with having me involved with her second kid’s delivery,” he says. “It turned into a really positive experience, but it was certainly a mental challenge for me to get around that.”
>It wasn’t until 2004 that Pulfrey made his way to Whistler. He had been engaged to a woman in New Mexico while working at a trauma centre, but the relationship fell apart. He then returned to Canada to work at Vancouver General Hospital (VGH) and did some nursing along the Northwest Coast.
>A friend doing radiology in Whistler informed him that the centre was seeking nurses. He was interviewed and later hired for a seasonal position. He has been there ever since, having accepted a permanent part-time position last fall.
>“Compared to other places, Whistler’s unique and fantastically positive,” he says. “Your voice is heard so you feel like you have some influence over your place of work, which is really good.”
>National Nursing Week is not the only event taking place this week to commemorate the work of Canada’s nurses. International Nurses Day was May 12 and the Canadian Nurses Association is celebrated its 100 th anniversary this year.
>Townley, now a veteran nurse, still finds it rewarding to work in Whistler.
>“There have been so many times that we have saved lives,” she says. “It just feels so good to be able to do that… a patient from the bike park coming off the hill with a ruptured spleen, and we get them down to Squamish in time for surgery, and we save a life.”
>“We know a lot of people that come through, we are a real community.”
