Last month, Kayla Legault submitted an application to work in the kitchen of the Pontiac Hospital over the summer.
Legault is a 17-year-old Fort Coulonge native currently finishing up high school in Mont Laurier, and she wants to become a nurse.
She figured the sooner she could get her foot in the door at the hospital and get a feel for how the ship runs, the better.
She went into the interview for the kitchen position thinking that at best, she would secure a full-time job that would help her pay for nursing studies, which she is set to begin this fall.
But in that interview, Legault also learned she was eligible for a new scholarship being offered to nursing students with a connection to the Pontiac who intend to return to the region to work.
Legault quickly got an application in, and soon after, she was informed it had been successful.
“I was kind of surprised. It felt really amazing to know that I got a scholarship and to me it’s an honour to be one of the few people who got one,” Legault said. “It means a lot to me.”
Legault is one of four local nursing students who have been selected to receive a bursary from the Pontiac Community Hospital Foundation that will support their studies in the city in exchange for their promise they will return to nursing positions in the Pontiac once they graduate.
Legault, Julie Soucie, Sarah Jewell, and Marie-Pier Dufour will each receive . . .
$5,000 for each year of nursing studies they complete. For every $5,000 the students receive, they will be asked to work one year as a nurse in the Pontiac.
Nicole Boucher-Larivière is the Pontiac director for the Centre intégré de santé et des services sociaux de l’Outaouais (CISSSO), which worked with the hospital foundation to coordinate these scholarships.
“The cost of lodging in the city right now is absolutely phenomenal,” Boucher-Larivière said at the announcement of the recipients on Tuesday.
“Students from the area can’t travel there every day. It’s absolutely impossible, so we have a lot of young students who just get discouraged, or they end their studies quicker or they don’t finish their degrees because it’s just too expensive.”
The bursaries 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.
“When it came time to honour Shawville in memory of my family, I turned to two people I knew and it’s really to their credit that they came up with this idea. I love the longer term nature of it, the community aspect, building something that will be here for a long time,” MacLachlan said.
He and his wife reached out to the hospital’s Dr. Tom O’Neill and foundation vice-president Allan Dean to explore the possibility of making a donation to the hospital.
“Helping means knowing who to listen to,” Gusarova said. “We did not want to bring preconceived ideas, we wanted to ask what was needed. It’s really humbling to watch it unfold.”
The students selected to receive this bursary are each at a different stage in their nursing studies.
“It was a benefit to the hospital to have that diversification between the two levels – more experienced ones versus the newer ones coming in,” Dean said. “The newer ones can learn from the older ones.”
Julie Soucie, the oldest student of the group, has already been working as a licensed practical nurse in the region for 10 years. She works at the long-term care facility at the Pontiac Hospital, and last year she went back to school to improve her qualifications.
For the past year she has been driving to the city for nine hours of classes, three days a week, in addition to working two full days at the hospital. The condensed program will enable her to complete her studies in two years. Now going into her second year, she will be supported by a $5,000 cushion which she said will go a long way in helping her with travel and car maintenance costs.
Sarah Jewell, another bursary recipient, has worked as a nursing student in the emergency department at the Pontiac Hospital for the past year.
She is finishing up her CEGEP nursing program and will use the bursary for two years of the bachelor’s in nursing she plans to start in the fall.
“I will be traveling from Fort Coulonge to Gatineau every day for university, so this money will really help,” Jewell said.
Marie-Pier Dufour, the final bursary recipient is, like Legault, just beginning her nursing studies. She grew up in Cantley but has many family members who live in the Pontiac which, combined with her expressed desire to settle in the region, qualified her for the scholarship.
“I love that the healthcare is really close to the patient here,” she said, referring to healthcare services in the Pontiac.
“I think that here it’s more personalized. They care more. That’s why I love to be here in the Pontiac.”
Dufour has just completed her first year of the nursing program at CEGEP de l’Outaouais, and in May started a job as a receptionist for the emergency department in Fort Coulonge’s CLSC.
She will use two years of the bursary to complete her CEGEP program, and hopes to pursue a bachelor’s degree afterwards.
“The money that the MacLachlan family is injecting into the Pontiac is absolutely amazing. It’s probably the one thing we need the most,” Boucher-Larivière said.
“We’ve got a very vulnerable population in the Pontiac. It’s one of the poorest areas in Quebec. And so we need to keep our healthcare services local and to do that we need quality care. They deserve that. And to do that we need new nurses that are from the area, that want to be here, and that know our population.”
