A $5.1 million investment into Assiniboine Community College from the Province will be impacting ACC’s nurse training program.

“For us, it actually allows us to expand nursing quite significantly,” explains ACC President, Mark Frison. “Nursing is already our biggest program, and this will add three rotating sites, so twenty-five seats each, and it will allow us to double our intake in Portage to thirty-five [students] every year, instead of every second year. And so, it adds a lot of nursing seats, and it’s a fairly big commitment on the part of the government, $5.1 million to our base budget. This is the largest increase in funded seats that the college has seen in over twenty years.”

ACC will be working with the regional health authorities to determine training locations and when to start accepting course registrations. “Then, it’s a matter of having community facilities. Facilities is always the biggest challenge of whether there is something that is large enough to host and affordable enough to be able to move something into it for a couple of years.”

Frison says the expanded nursing program could take place as soon as May of 2022.

“If you’re someone who is wanting to take the program, I’d certainly be taking a look at the ACC website. There is some pre-work that nurses might need like taking a math for nurses’ course. So, there are ways you can get yourself ready to be an applicant.”

When it comes to the demand for nurses and the training, Frison says both are significant. “We’ve never had a seat go unfilled in a nursing site. There’s always folks who want to take it.”

In the rural areas of the province, ACC tends to give priority to those who are within a 45-minute drive of their training centre. “So, there is a tiered process there, trying to give people who live local and will stay local and will work local,” he adds. “So that’s one of the benefits of the rural rotating.”