With classes and work terms cancelled, MUN nursing students worry about graduating on time
Students support their professors but hope for a quick resolution to the strike, says Madison Bailey
A class of nursing students set to graduate in May is worried that won't happen because of a labour dispute between the Memorial University of Newfoundland Faculty Association and university administration.
Madison Bailey, a fourth-year nursing student in MUN's faculty of nursing, said her classes have all been cancelled, along with a work-term she's supposed to be completing, amid the strike. But the two other nursing schools in the province — the Centre for Nursing Studies, operated by Eastern Health, and the Western Regional School of Nursing in Corner Brook — remain unaffected.
"There's a stop to all of our courses and clinicals, which greatly affects my class in particular because we're in our … final semester of nursing," Bailey said Wednesday. "We're basically doing our work term right now but that's on pause."
CNS students on the same 12-week work term and unit as Bailey at the Health Sciences Centre are continuing with their education while Bailey and her classmates stand on the picket line in support of their striking instructors.
She said it's a stressful situation and students are trying to figure out a way to complete their work term, graduate on time and help with the province's nursing labour shortage.
"Right now there's a pause on 70 of us. That's 70 new graduate nurses. A lot of us are going to Eastern Health and places in Newfoundland [when we graduate]," Bailey said.
"We're all super-stressed out. That's the consensus between our whole, entire class. We don't know what's going to happen. There's been hardly any communication between us and administration."
Bailey said she and her classmates support the faculty association but want to see the strike end soon so they can move on with their education, get back on hospital unit floors and get the job experience they need by May.
"The three schools are supposed to be on the same curriculum. And we are, we're all getting the same education, the same degree at the end of the day, but we're being affected definitely the most by this," she said.
"There wasn't really a plan set up for us. What's going to happen to us? We still don't know, and it's been a couple of days. It could be a couple of days that this goes on, or it could be weeks. It could be even months and that could really affect us starting our jobs in May."
Bailey, like many of her classmates, already has a job lined up, with orientation scheduled for May 1.
Premier Andrew Furey says the provincial government is hoping for a quick resolution for students' sake.
"Just think about what these students have been through in the last three years. There's been nothing normal about their education," Furey said Tuesday.
"To have a labour dispute thrown into their degree training at this point is certainly problematic, and we would hope that both sides see that and both sides can be open to coming back to the table and have a speedy resolution to this."
If the issue of having representation on the university's board of regents is the sticking point, said Furey, that's something government "would commit to." But he added it's not an overnight solution.
"The MUN act is a very big piece of legislation. It's one that we would need multiple sources of input from but that would be a commitment that we would honour for sure," he said.
With files from Jeremy Eaton