George Brown College, in partnership with the Canadian Nursing Student’s Association, held a symposium for the students in the Practical Nursing program following a series of emails expressing dissatisfaction with the quality of their education.  

The symposium was intended to enhance communication between students and the CNSA by providing the former with a platform to discuss and resolve concerns that they have been experiencing with their virtual studies.  

Mehak Khawaja, the official delegate of the CNSA for three schools including George Brown College, was present as well to converse with the students. As a nursing student herself at Ryerson University, she could relate to student complaints. Khawaja has been associated with GBC as a CNSA delegate for two years now.  

The idea for a symposium came about when the CNSA realized that the complaints that were brought forward were plenty, diverse and complicated. “Essentially, what we found was that there’s a lot of students individually texting us with a lot of different issues, some of which we as the CNSA can solve, some of which is completely out of our control,” Khawaja said.  

The symposium covered each issue from connecting with professors to online learning, to concerns over future internships. 

While the issue of maintaining contact with educators was not brought up by anyone specifically, the emails received by the CNSA revealed it to be a repeating theme.  

Talking about the most pressing issue Khawaja said, “I would have to say the number one thing is communication. I know with school becoming virtual, it’s been hard for professors to really convey what they need to say to students, but I feel like over the two years of the pandemic, that issue is the one thing that is not getting resolved at all. Students are still finding it hard to communicate with their professors.”  

Nurses have been at the frontline of the pandemic during the past two years, and as a nursing student, so has Khawaja. Recalling her experience as a second-year nursing student sent in COVID wards, she explained how it affected her. 

“I’m not going to lie, it was extremely overwhelming. Right before we entered the floor, it felt like we were walking into a war zone. We got a briefing outside the unit, you think it’s going to be a level of stress, and then you start working and it is 10 times that level of stress,” she lamented.  

The stress and anxiety of working through a pandemic as a nursing student alone is not an easy feat, and especially so as students simultaneously contend with online school.   

“It was just very stressful, being a student,” said Khawaja. “And being put in that position was a lot for us because, we’re not nurses at the end of the day. We’re not 100 per cent prepared for it. And we didn’t really get much time to also be prepared for it. It’s scary for anyone”.  

This leads to a major question besides all the physical measures: Were any mental health aids provided to the nursing students who had to expose themselves to such a risky situation completely unprepared?   

“I would say that we’ve gotten emails, informing that counseling is available, but I don’t think it specifically targets what nursing students are going through,” Khawaja noted. 

“Because I feel the struggles that nursing students go through when dealing with these kinds of things is very different than our regular struggles. I feel like we could potentially benefit from more supports directed towards nursing students going through the pandemic, and how that has affected our educational career.”