REGINA — The province has announced a new high school course is being launched to introduce students to the health-care sector.
The course being launched is Health Careers 20L and is being offered by Saskatchewan Distance Learning Corporation (Sask DLC) as an elective to students in Grades 10 to 12.
The course is developed locally by teachers, and Sask DLC will offer the course online to every student in the province as one of nine new courses they plan to offer starting this fall. As well, local schools will also have an opportunity to offer the course to students in person.
The announcement was made by Education Minister Everett Hindley in Regina on Tuesday. The idea, according to Hindley, is to give students early exposure to the health-care sector and what a career in the field might look like, with Health Careers 20L possibly setting them on a path toward a career in the field.
“Really what it does is it provides an exploratory opportunity for students in grade 10 to 12 to learn about a whole host of career options in health care,” said Hindley.
“And I think that’s what the intention of the course is to be able to provide that exposure, provide some information to students so that they know what kind of options exist out there. I think back to my time in high school and I kind of hearken back to those days and wish that I had this opportunity to learn about some of the more exciting opportunities I think that are available across our province and frankly across Canada and the globe.”
Hindley said students will be able to get a “high-level understanding” and learn about things like medical imaging, diagnostics and nursing. A couple of additions, he said, have been added through consultation with the Virtual Health Hub, including potential opportunities as physician assistants and in virtual health-care administration — things that didn’t exist all that long ago, but are really exciting opportunities, he said, not just for the health-care sector but for students as well.
The reason they want students to learn about this in school rather than finding out about it after they are done high school, said Hindley, is because “we want to be able to present these options to students at as early an age as possible. Again, I think that having this option presented as early as grade 10, it really provides students in today’s world with the opportunity to look at what is available out there as a career path.”
“I think back to when I was in high school. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do when I was in grade 9 and I’m trying to choose my classes for grades 10, 11, and 12 and trying to sort of predict my future and where I would end up post-secondary education or the workforce. And I think that the earlier we can provide these opportunities and this insight to students, the better it is.”
From the ministry standpoint, success of this program is in the number of registrations they have in it, said Hindley. It will also be measured a few years down the road by whether Health Careers 20L leads students into more career-specific post-secondary education and training, whether through Saskatchewan Polytechnic, universities or other institutions.
“I look forward to the day when we can look back and see someone who’s applied for and been given a job in a health-care field here in Saskatchewan, at a Saskatchewan hospital or long-term care facility, and they can look back and say, how I ended up here today was by getting signed up for the Health Careers 20L course. And that’s what led me to where I’m at today.”
Darren Gasper, CEO of Sask DLC, said the program has been in the works for about 18 months, from “the time we had initial discussions, began to write the curriculum and engage with other stakeholders around what the program can look like and what content areas to prioritize within it.”
He said they have had some “broad discussions with a number of stakeholders. That includes staff from the Ministry of Health, the Saskatchewan Health Authority, the Cancer Agency, a number of other stakeholders kind of across the spectrum that all have career needs.”
He sees success of the program in terms of former students coming back and letting them know “they have a career opportunity or a very clear career path for them. That’s pretty rewarding to us in terms of bringing that opportunity to them.”
They also see potential to grow the program into broader areas. “If you think of the need in our province around care aides or nursing or those other occupations, we see lots of opportunity to expand the program into those more specific needs, especially at the grade 12 level as kids are getting ready to make that post-secondary choice.”
Health Minister Jeremy Cockrill sees potential for people who take this course to be able to go on and develop health-care careers in their own communities. He gave an example of someone who might be living in La Ronge.
“You’re becoming aware of that potential healthcare career while you’re a student in La Ronge at the DLC, maybe you’re earning credit as you’re working some hours toward that, and then we can stream you right into that program through Northlands College and then you’re prepared to go work in the brand new long-term care facility in La Ronge that’s under construction… I think that really speaks kind of the whole continuum of providing those opportunities to Saskatchewan kids and then making sure we have, you know, the capital and the incentive so that they’re practising and serving patients in Saskatchewan.”
As for what this program will look like down the road, Cockrill said he hopes that “wherever your family is, wherever you live in Saskatchewan, that you have just this full spectrum of opportunities to get into a healthcare career, regardless of where you live.”
