Sarah Pledge Dickson, LJI Journalist
The Pontiac Community Hospital Foundation announced a new round of recipients of its recently-created bursary for nursing students on Monday morning at the Pontiac Hospital.
Jessica Jewell of Mansfield and Annie Claude Durocher of Fort Coulonge are the latest to receive the MacLachlan family bursary for nursing students who plan to return to work in the Pontiac.
Jewell, who is 28 years old and has three kids, including a newborn, is working on getting a bachelor’s degree in nursing through a program offered jointly between Algonquin College in Pembroke and the University of Ottawa. She said that this bursary takes some of the financial pressure off her studies.
“It’s just taking a bit of a load off,” Jewell said. “I can’t work full time and go to school full time so it’s taking some stress off.”
Durocher, 21, will be graduating from a college program in nursing in May and plans to pursue a bachelor’s in the field.
She will be the first recipient of the bursary to start working full-time at the Pontiac Hospital. Over the Christmas break, she worked at the hospital as part of her training in the emergency department and said that she loved it.
“I always wanted to work in healthcare to help people,” Durocher said. “The nursing career was something I wanted to do.”
The MacLachlan bursary awards students $5,000 for each year of nursing studies they complete.
The scholarships are funded with a $100,000 donation to the hospital foundation from Bill MacLachlan, Jr., and his wife Inga Gusarova, who now live in Calgary but often spend time at their cottage in the Pontiac.
MacLachlan’s parents William (Bill) and Elsie MacLachlan moved to Shawville for work at the mill when it opened in 1966, and proceeded to raise him and his sisters Janice and Carole in town. His father Bill served as president of the hospital foundation for several years.
Allan Dean, the president of the Pontiac Community Hospital Foundation, presented the awards on behalf of the MacLachlan family Monday morning at the hospital. He said when they were trying to figure out how best to use the donation, they honed in on the importance of nurses.
“We identified very quickly that the need had to be for nurses,” Dean said. “You can have the greatest facilities in the region and they have to cancel surgeries because there’s no nurses available.”
Natalie Romain, the clinical administrative coordinator at the hospital, expressed how impressed she was by this year’s recipients. She hopes this bursary helps fill the need for nurses in the region.
“We don’t have enough nurses,” Romain said. “We’re always having to pull from one service to another. To provide good, quality, quantity care, we need nurses on the floor.”
She explained that the hospital, which has 34 beds, would require 3-4 registered nurses (RN) on the floor during any given day shift. At the moment, there are only 1-2 RNs taking care of all the patients and four nursing assistants (LPNs).
Durocher sees the bursary as an opportunity to support her community.
“I find it’s like a give-give situation,” Durocher said. “They give us money to go to school and we give back to the community and our people by working here.”
Jewell, whose family has deep nursing roots, said she knows how much the community needs nurses.
“I think it’s a great program to give to people who are from here and who want to come back here,” Jewell said. “My sisters are nurses and my mom so I hear their stories about being short staffed and I always thought, I could do that too and it feels good to come back home.”