The Ontario government pledged more than $117-million to a project to get nursing students into hospitals to help assist with tasks such as bathing, feeding and making beds. The program, called an externship, was developed to help ease the strain on hospital staff during COVID-19’s second wave and was extended in April 2021 to include 38 hospitals with plans to hire more than 4,000 students over the next year. Externships pay students slightly more than minimum wage and allow them to work daily in a hospital setting. Laura Slipp, a recent nursing graduate of the Humber College and University of New Brunswick program in Toronto, completed an externship at Sunnybrook Health Sciences in March 2021. She was then hired to join one of the organization’s resource teams. She says the externship provided the hands-on experience she felt she missed during the pandemic, when clinical placements were restricted. “You learn so much just from being immersed in the hospital setting,” says Slipp. (Globe and Mail, June 1)