The University of Calgary is looking to increase nurse longevity and create business-savvy health care practitioners with new graduate certificate.
Beginning in fall 2025, the Professional Practice Entrepreneurship graduate certificate aims to teach Registered Nurses (RNs), Nurse Practitioners (NPs), and other healthcare providers, entrepreneurial and business skills.
The four-term course aims to help these healthcare professionals open their own practices.
“At the University of Calgary, we have expertise in entrepreneurship, and we have expertise in nurse practitioner education and nursing education. Let’s see if we can combine them and create a program to support this population,” said Kimberly Shapkin, an associate professor of teaching at the University of Calgary and a nurse practitioner.
The course is made up of virtual classes and synchronous “connect times” where students can come together virtually. The setup is aimed at supporting practitioners who are working full time, allowing them to advance their education while working.
The program began offering graduate certificates in 2019. The certificate courses were moved online because of COVID-19.
“What we saw was a great increase in applications for people that were interested in our programs once we started offering them online, because it was far more accessible for our students and nurses don’t work a standard 9-5,” said Dr. Lorelli Nowell, Associate Dean Graduate Programs for the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Calgary.
“Many of them work 12-hour shifts, night, evenings, weekends, so the online format really accommodates for those students to be able to learn where and when they’re able.”
Nowell mentioned that nearly half of Canadian nurses leave the profession a few years after graduating, highlighting how the practice is still “rigid” and can be unforgiving.
“Nurses are generally overworked and undercompensated. We have students that are graduating with skills to be able to innovate within the healthcare systems where they’re working, but the systems aren’t quite ready for students with that skill set,” she said.
“We’re not offering a lot of nurses those opportunities to up-skill or re-skill in different areas they might be interested in. The more we can offer those opportunities for nurses to maybe reimagine their career, as opposed to resigning.”
Nowell hopes that entrepreneurial skills and opening autonomous practices can help increase nurses’ longevity in the practice.
“It gives them the opportunity to really plant their feet somewhere and make it their own. That doesn’t often happen in nursing careers, where people can say, ‘I’m going to do this, and I’m going to take ownership of this, and I’m going to be able to set up my own practice the way I want to do it,’” she said.
Nurses are “entrepreneurs at heart” without practical business skills
Shapkin said that the healthcare landscape is changing, highlighting fiscal responsibility
“We have to be more creative on how we can help make a change in people’s lives in a creative way that maybe hasn’t been tried before, because we’ve been doing a lot of the same things in past,” she said.
Nurses innovating in real time to meet patients’ needs are entrepreneurs at heart, according to Shapkin, though they lack business knowledge.
“(Nurse practitioners) always create things to make them work for the situation. We’re highly educated in clinical competency, how do you care for people and meet the health needs of somebody from a very a clinical perspective, we spend a lot of time on advocacy and teaching our nursing students how to speak out for others and to really help them,” she said.
“One of the big gaps is we don’t have a lot of business knowledge.”
The course will also teach students how to protect patients’ privacy, ensure confidentiality and meet government regulations, Shapkin said. The course will also teach accounting and human resources procedures, as well as creating positive work environments.
Applications for the Professional Practice Entrepreneurship certificate are open until June 30.
Kaiden Brayshaw,
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
LiveWire Calgary
