Visiting a health-care clinic brings the strains on Canada’s medical system into sharp focus: crowded waiting rooms, busy physicians and nurses who have limited time for each patient.
While this has always been a stressful environment, a lack of family doctors, increased staffing shortages throughout the system and more complex health-care needs since the pandemic have made the challenge even more acute.
This perfect storm means that patients face frustratingly long waits for both routine and complex care while many health-care professionals battle workload fatigue.
To address this issue, Carleton University’s School of Nursing is offering the world’s first undergraduate nursing degree with RN Prescribing. Graduates will be able to prescribe medications from a provincially-regulated list in clinical and community settings outside of hospitals.
Preparing for the Future of Health Care
In 2023, Ontario changed the provincial Nursing Act to allow qualified nurses to assess patients and prescribe from a list of 30 medications and classifications, including those used to address common sexual health needs, travel vaccinations, assistance for quitting smoking and treating wounds.
Graduates of Carleton’s nursing school will help patients access faster care and improve clinic efficiency.
Danielle Manley, director of the School of Nursing, explains that Carleton’s launch of its nursing program in 2025 provided a unique opportunity to design a future-focused degree in its entirety – including the ability to introduce training on prescribing medication for all students.
“Carleton has taken an approach where we have woven these skills throughout our curriculum,” she says.
“We talk about legislation, the scope of practice and technicalities throughout the whole three years of the program. Every student will have this foundational knowledge and graduate with these extended competencies.”
Students are also being prepared to manage the potential addition of future medications.
“The program is not only training nurses for the current list of medications,” Manley says, “but also for when that list increases and as the scope expands.”
New Tools for Nurse Training
Rapidly advancing technology is changing health care dramatically, and Carleton’s nursing program has embraced these changes, offering an optional concentration in AI and Data Science for students. This focus on technology extends to prescribing.
Nursing students traditionally learn by practicing skills in a clinical setting, but while there are already registered nurse prescribers working in Ontario today, there are not enough for students to follow in clinics and learn from.
“As in all medical programs, we have clinical placements where we go and practice these skills in a real setting,” says Manley.
“There isn’t the capacity to funnel that many students through a clinical setting, so we are leveraging simulation technology.”
Carleton’s program will utilize virtual and augmented reality systems and realistic medical manikins to provide students with the opportunity to practice these important skills.
“Now we can standardize and produce the quantity of training we need in the current state of the medical system.”
Increasing Equity for Underserved Populations and Remote Communities
Supporting mental health is another part of healing a health-care system under strain. Carleton’s School of Nursing offers an elective concentration in Neuroscience and Mental Health, preparing graduates for careers as psychotherapists.
While medications focused on managing mental health symptoms have not yet been added to the provincial list, Carleton’s nurses are ready for the potential inclusion of these medicines in the years to come. As registered nurse prescribers, they would be able to provide mental health assessments and prescriptions for patients in their own clinical psychotherapy practices.
“In our program, we emphasize leadership,” says Manley.
“Carleton University graduates will understand what opening an independent practice could look like.”
For rural and remote communities where a hospital may be many hours away, having nurses available to prescribe common medications in their own clinics or as part of an in-home visit could be a game changer for health equity and accessibility.
Addressing the needs of underserved communities is at the core of Carleton’s nursing program; enabling all graduates to prescribe medications is a key aspect of delivering on this commitment.
“With a curriculum focused on future oriented clinical leadership, our graduates will be entering a healthcare workforce enabled to make system-level change and understand how impactful they can be in underserviced communities and regions.”