Carleton University's new bachelor of science in nursing program will welcome its first class of 110 students in September of 2025. The school aims to enroll twice that number by 2030.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
Carleton University in Ottawa is opening the first new university nursing school in Ontario in more than 20 years as the provincial government looks to train more registered nurses faster to help keep a struggling public health system afloat.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford and Carleton officials formally announced the opening of the school on Tuesday afternoon. The new bachelor of science in nursing program, created in partnership with the Queensway Carleton Hospital, will welcome its first class of 110 students in September of 2025. The school aims to enroll twice that number by 2030.
“It has been two decades since we’ve had a new program, and I think it’s super exciting,” Leigh Chapman, the chief nursing officer of Canada, told The Globe and Mail in an interview. “We need extended seats, but we also need these types of new, innovative programs.”
The Carleton nursing school, which will operate on a compressed, year-round schedule that allows students to graduate in three years, is part of a larger national effort to create new nursing programs and increase the number of seats in existing nursing schools.
Provincial governments, desperate to train and keep nurses in the aftermath of a COVID-19 pandemic that drove many from the public system, are funding the school expansions alongside their efforts to expedite licensing for experienced nurses from overseas.
Acadia University in Nova Scotia and Beal University, a U.S. institution that operates in the Maritimes, are also developing new nursing programs, according to Devin Crockett, a spokesman for the Canadian Association of Schools of Nursing (CASN). Eight degree-granting colleges in Ontario are working on establishing programs to graduate registered nurses as well, he said by e-mail.
Meanwhile, according to a CASN report to be released later this month, the number of students admitted to schools of nursing in Canada rose to 19,631 in 2022-2023, up from 15,571 in 2019-2020, the last academic year before COVID-19 struck.
Ontario is spending $128-million over the next three years to increase seats for 2,000 future registered nurses and 1,000 registered practical nurses at colleges and universities, the Ministry of Health said in a news release announcing Carleton’s new program.
As nursing schools expand, Dr. Chapman said governments will need to be wary of shortages of PhD-level nursing instructors. “Without faculty,” she said, “we run the risk of not preserving the quality of nursing education.”
Carleton’s new program will be only the second in Ontario, after Lakehead University, to offer a bachelor of science in nursing degree that can be completed in three years by students coming straight out of high school. The program will be nine semesters long, like traditional four-year programs, but Carleton’s nurses-in-training won’t get summers off.
All of Canada needs, “more nurses faster,” said Danielle Manley, director of Carleton’s school of nursing.
However, she emphasized that increasing the supply of nurses is as much about retaining newly graduated nurses as it is about educating them in the first place. To that end, Carleton’s school will ask academically qualified students to submit a supplementary application that helps admission officers spot prospective students with the grit necessary to thrive in a tough profession.
“We do want to make sure that students have traits that will be conducive to supporting a compressed program in a burnout profession,” Ms. Manley said.
The program, which Ms. Manley said emphasizes Indigenous health concepts, will reserve 10 seats for Indigenous students. Carleton will also earmark 10 seats for international nursing students, despite new federal limits on international student visas and Mr. Ford’s announcement last month that his government would bar the already rare practice of admitting international students to medical schools.
Carleton’s new program will see students specialize in mental health, neuroscience or data science. It will also include an RN prescribing course as part of the undergraduate curriculum – a first for Canada.
As it stands, nurses who want the authority to prescribe a limited number of medications in Ontario must take a course on their own after they graduate. Just more than 280 nurses have been authorized to prescribe since January, when the program opened.
Canada-wide efforts to educate, license and keep more nurses in the public system appear to be helping stem the health human-resources crisis, according to the latest job vacancy data from Statistics Canada. In the second quarter of this year, vacancies in health occupations fell by 4.3 per cent. Year-over-year, the number of vacancies dropped modestly for registered nurses and registered psychiatric nurses across Canada, the agency reported.
However, there were still 27,700 jobs in those categories sitting empty in the second quarter.
Yvonne Wilson, vice-president of patient care and chief nursing executive at the Queensway-Carleton Hospital, said she hopes her hospital’s partnership with Carleton University will go some of the way toward filling those posts. Students in the new program will begin clinical placements at the hospital in their first semester, earlier than in traditional university nursing schools.
”I think that as the school grows and other schools grow,” she said, “we’ll be able to turn the tide on this expected growth of the nursing shortage.”