rfmcdonald | [LINK] "Being a nurse in the North is challenging, but ‘there are salary perks’

Emily Burke of MacLean's reports on the high wages that nurses in the North can command.

Retaining nurses in any remote community in Canada is a challenge, but it’s particularly true in the Far North. To ensure that the most basic health needs are being met, governments must fly registered nurses up a few weeks at a time, so that there is a rotation of nurses working with the local population. Some of these communities have only a few hundred residents, no road access, and only visiting physicians.

The rotation of RNs is essential to the community, and so they are paid generously. For example, salaries of RNs in Ontario range between $21 and $40 per hour, while in the hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk on the coast of the Beaufort Sea in the farthest corner of Northwest Territories, RN jobs can pay in the range of $70 per hour, a percentage of which is a northern allowance provided by the government.

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The best way to keep nurses in remote communities is to educate and train the people who already live there. This is precisely the role of Arctic College in Iqaluit, which offers both a two-year diploma for licensed practical nurses, and a four-year bachelor degree for registered nurses. Many of the students enrolled at Arctic College are Inuit, and some of the classes are being taught in Inuktitut. However, Arctic doesn’t graduate a high volume of nurses: in both 2011 and 2012, no nurses graduated at all.