CALEB NICKERSON
SHAWVILLE Sept. 18, 2020
Friday marked the end of a local three-month expedited course for health care workers at the Pontiac Continuing Education Centre (PCEC) and all 11 grads are fully employed at local facilities.
A modest ceremony took place in the gym at Dr. S.E. McDowell Elementary School in the afternoon, with eight of the 11 graduates in attendance, along with some of their family members.
PCEC Principal Jennifer Dubeau gave an introduction, explaining that . . .
the course was started very abruptly following a mandate from the provincial government. The course that they usually give over the course of eight months was rapidly condensed into three, in order to get the students into local facilities as quickly as possible.
Instructor Susanne Poirier explained that while it wasn’t the exact same qualification as their regular graduates (students would only be allowed to work in long-term care facilities but not active-care wards), the pace of the course was still quite hectic.
“It was a three month program, 11 weeks total,” she said. “So it’s specific to long-term care, but still it was quite condensed, the hours were quite long, we put in a lot of good time, 375 hours in that short period of time.”
She said that the rules were being made on the fly, with important things like whether the students would be supervised on their placements up in the air from day to day.
“The guidelines weren’t all established whenever we started, and some of the boundaries and some of those guidelines, like can the teachers be on site, do they have to do distance supervision, how many hours can they go on site and come back to class, all those … everything we’ve been living came into play,” she said. “We’d get some instructions at one point, but those instructions could change at any moment. We had to be flexible, we had to adapt and also be very patient. Nobody’s lived this before, nobody’s done this before, and in a pandemic situation, it’s never been done.”
Similarly, the facilities they typically use for training were too small to accommodate social distancing for some occasions, and staff had to get creative. Poirier recalled that they did their first aid training spread out in the school gym, without air conditioning in the sweltering summer heat.
She said that the second phase of the course was conducted virtually, and work placements were started quicker than they normally would, to allow students to apply their skills in a practical setting.
“They had two days of virtual learning online with us, and then they had the rest of the week when they were on site,” she said. “We worked hard, we persevered as a group and I think it was really worth it.”
Poirier said that as soon as the program finished, the managers of the local long-term care facilities were chomping at the bit to get the new grads working. All 11 currently have full-time employment. She even had to bargain with managers to allow some of the students time off to attend their graduation.
“It was actually hard to get everyone here, because you’re out there, you’re working and they need you,” she said to the ceremony attendees. “I was negotiating with you managers, ‘Can we have them for an hour?’ I thought it was really important that we celebrate, there’s no precedent for what we’ve done.”
Poirier and her fellow instructor Heidi Hall wouldn’t be getting a breather after their busy summer however, as another cohort of students started the week after to finish the school year that was cut short in March.
