Barrhead Healthcare Attraction & Retention Committee

Barrhead Healthcare Attraction & Retention Committee A volunteer committee supporting the attraction and retention of healthcare professionals in the community of Barrhead.

Established and supported by the Rural Health Professions Action Plan (RhPAP).

Join us at our Healthcare Appreciation event. Happening now at the Barrhead Museum 4-7pm Oct 14th
10/14/2026

Join us at our Healthcare Appreciation event. Happening now at the Barrhead Museum 4-7pm Oct 14th

Welcoming Dr. Silvia Igboamalu to BarrheadThis November, Barrhead will welcome Dr. Silvia Igboamalu, a specialist obstet...
10/05/2026

Welcoming Dr. Silvia Igboamalu to Barrhead

This November, Barrhead will welcome Dr. Silvia Igboamalu, a specialist obstetrician and gynaecologist who will be joining the healthcare team at Barrhead Healthcare Centre. Her arrival brings valuable expertise in women’s health to our community, and we look forward to helping her feel at home here.

Trained in South Africa, Dr. Igboamalu brings extensive specialist training and experience in obstetric and gynaecological care. Her practice will support women through each stage of life—from adolescence through the reproductive years and pregnancy, and into menopause. Services will include pregnancy and childbirth management, postpartum care, general gynaecological care, and appropriate office-based procedures.

At the heart of her work is a commitment to compassionate, comprehensive and patient-centred care. She looks forward to working alongside local physicians and other healthcare professionals to support the health and wellbeing of women in Barrhead and the surrounding communities.

Establishing a practice and settling into a new community is a significant chapter. Dr. Igboamalu has shared that she is looking forward to becoming part of Barrhead, and that feeling is warmly returned. Beyond the work ahead, we hope she finds familiar faces, meaningful connections and a place where she feels she belongs.

On behalf of the Barrhead Healthcare Attraction & Retention Committee, welcome, Dr. Igboamalu. We are pleased that you have chosen to bring your expertise to Barrhead and look forward to getting to know you as both a healthcare colleague and a member of our community.

The Small MomentsFor me, morale is built in small moments.It’s noticing someone is overwhelmed and stepping in without b...
10/02/2026

The Small Moments

For me, morale is built in small moments.

It’s noticing someone is overwhelmed and stepping in without being asked. It’s thanking someone for helping you. It’s telling a newer nurse, “You handled that really well.” It’s sharing what you know and admitting what you don’t. It’s checking on the person who just walked out of a difficult room.

And sometimes it’s laughing so hard together that, for thirty seconds, everyone forgets how tired they are.

Because when you’re discovering what kind of nurse you want to become, the people you learn beside become part of that story too.

They challenge you.
They teach you.
They support you.
They make the difficult shifts lighter.

And, if you’re lucky, somewhere along the way they stop feeling like simply the people you work with.

They become your team—and, for me, many have become family.

— Shanda Kaus, RN, BScN

And Then There Is HumourAnyone who has worked with me knows I use a lot of it.Healthcare is serious work, but that doesn...
10/01/2026

And Then There Is Humour

Anyone who has worked with me knows I use a lot of it.
Healthcare is serious work, but that doesn’t mean the workplace has to feel heavy all the time. We see people on some of the hardest days of their lives. We carry enormous responsibility, make difficult decisions and sometimes move directly from one stressful situation into another.

Laughter doesn’t diminish the seriousness of that work.

Sometimes it helps us carry it.

A well-timed joke can break the tension in a room. Laughter after a difficult situation can help a team reset. Being able to laugh together, celebrate the little victories and genuinely enjoy the people around you can turn an exhausting shift into a good one.

— Shanda Kaus, RN, BScN

Who You Become Is Shaped by Who You Work BesideYou don’t have to come to Barrhead knowing exactly what kind of nurse you...
09/30/2026

Who You Become Is Shaped by Who You Work Beside

You don’t have to come to Barrhead knowing exactly what kind of nurse you want to be.

Come here and discover it.

And that discovery doesn’t happen alone.

Some of the greatest lessons in nursing aren’t found in textbooks, policies or courses. They’re learned from the people standing beside you—the nurse who shows you a better way to do something, the colleague who notices something you missed, the physician who takes the time to explain what they’re seeing, or the experienced nurse who says, “Come with me. You should see this.”

Over time, those moments shape you.

In a rural healthcare centre, we work closely together. We depend on one another across departments, disciplines and shifts. Our smaller teams mean we get to know each other’s strengths. We learn who has experience with something unusual, who stays remarkably calm when everything goes sideways and who you want standing next to you when a situation suddenly becomes serious.

That’s one of the things I value most about working here.
I believe people learn best when they feel safe enough to ask questions.

A new nurse should be able to say, “I’ve never done this before,” without feeling embarrassed. A seasoned nurse should be able to say, “Can you take another look at this with me?” without questioning their competence. Any member of the team should feel comfortable saying, “Something isn’t right.”

Those conversations don’t make us less capable.

They’re part of how we become capable.

I also believe experienced nurses have a responsibility to share what experience has taught us. Knowledge shouldn’t be guarded by seniority. I remember being new and how much it mattered when someone took an extra minute to explain not only what we were doing, but why.

Now I get to be that person for someone else.

— Shanda Kaus, RN, BScN

One Hospital. Many Paths.One of the things I appreciate about working in a rural healthcare centre is that your career d...
09/29/2026

One Hospital. Many Paths.

One of the things I appreciate about working in a rural healthcare centre is that your career doesn’t necessarily have to remain within one department or one area of practice.

At Barrhead Healthcare Centre, nurses have opportunities to develop experience across acute care, Emergency, maternity, surgical services and the operating room, chemotherapy, infusion therapy in its own clinic, home care and other areas based on community need. There are opportunities to move between areas, cross-train and continually expand your clinical knowledge.

That creates something particularly valuable for nurses early in their careers:
You don’t have to know exactly what kind of nurse you want to become before you begin.

You can build your foundation somewhere and keep growing.
That has certainly been true for me.

I have spent much of my nursing career in acute care, and for a long time I considered it my home base. Acute care taught me the fundamentals that continue to shape the nurse I am today: managing multiple patients and competing priorities, recognizing subtle deterioration, caring for complex medical patients, communicating with physicians and multidisciplinary teams, supporting families and learning to see the whole patient rather than simply the diagnosis written at the top of the chart.

It gave me an opportunity to learn obstetrics and the ability to independently facilitate a pessary clinic for a period of time.

Acute care gave me my foundation; Emergency nursing expanded it.

Moving into Emergency opened another dimension of nursing for me.

Instead of receiving a patient with an established diagnosis and plan of care, you often meet them at the very beginning of the story. Someone walks through the door with chest pain, weakness, abdominal pain, shortness of breath, confusion or an injury—and initially, you may have very few answers.

You assess. You investigate. You recognize patterns. You anticipate. You prioritize.

You learn to ask yourself: What could this be? What am I most concerned about? What could change quickly? What does this patient need right now?

That kind of nursing has challenged and energized me. Even with years of experience behind me, Emergency has made me a learner again.

I think that’s one of the greatest opportunities we can give younger nurses: the chance to start somewhere, build a strong foundation, discover what interests them, cross-train, try something new and keep learning.

One nurse may discover that Emergency is where they thrive. Another may become fascinated by perioperative nursing. Someone else may find their calling in chemotherapy, acute medicine, maternity or another area entirely.

And some will become those wonderfully versatile rural nurses who can comfortably move between several of them.

That versatility is one of rural healthcare’s greatest strengths.

— Shanda Kaus, RN, BScN

Start Rural. Learn Everything.In large urban hospitals, healthcare is built around specialization. There are dedicated u...
09/28/2026

Start Rural. Learn Everything.

In large urban hospitals, healthcare is built around specialization. There are dedicated units, teams and disciplines for nearly every body system, patient population and level of acuity. Cardiac patients may go to cardiology. Neurological patients to neuroscience. Children to pediatrics. Critically ill patients to intensive care. Trauma patients may be met by an entire specialized trauma team.

That model provides extraordinary expertise, technology and resources—but it also means healthcare professionals can become highly specialized within one particular area of practice.

Rural healthcare asks something different of you.

Come rural, and those neatly divided clinical worlds begin to overlap.

You may care for an elderly patient with heart failure on acute care and later assess a child with respiratory distress in Emergency. You may encounter sepsis, mental-health crises, fractures, gastrointestinal emergencies, obstetrical concerns, overdoses, wounds, cardiac events, neurological symptoms, palliative patients and major trauma—sometimes within the same stretch of shifts.

There isn’t always another specialized department down the hallway to take over.

So you learn.

You learn assessment. You learn medications. You learn cardiac rhythms, respiratory emergencies, neurological changes, wounds, infections, mental health, trauma and chronic disease. You learn what can be managed locally and when a patient needs a higher level of care. You learn how to stabilize someone while arranging that transfer. You learn to anticipate what may be needed next and how to work closely with EMS, laboratory, diagnostic imaging, pharmacy, physicians and other nurses.

But rural nursing teaches more than clinical knowledge.

It teaches resourcefulness and adaptability. It teaches you to recognize when something isn’t right before you necessarily know exactly what it is. It teaches you how to prioritize when five things need your attention and only one can come first. It teaches you when to lead, when to ask for help and when to become the help someone else needs.

Because rural healthcare teams are smaller, nurses can also take on responsibilities and roles they might not encounter as quickly elsewhere. You become accustomed to wearing several hats. You develop relationships across departments. You see patients through different stages of their care rather than only through one specialized piece of it.

That breadth creates a remarkably diverse knowledge base.

There is tremendous value in specialization, and rural nursing is not a replacement for specialty expertise. It develops a different kind of clinician: the generalist who knows a little about almost everything, knows a great deal about many things and—perhaps most importantly—knows how to recognize when something requires expertise beyond their own.

That is why rural nursing experience carries weight.

You don’t simply learn how to perform a job.

You learn how to be a nurse.

— Shanda Kaus, RN, BScN

Before a surgical instrument reaches a patient, somebody has already done a lot of very important work.Think about every...
09/18/2026

Before a surgical instrument reaches a patient, somebody has already done a lot of very important work.

Think about everything that happens to a surgical instrument after it has been used and before it can safely be used again. It has to be collected, taken apart when needed, decontaminated, inspected, reassembled, tested, sterilized, packaged, stored and returned where it is needed. That process is part of the MDR technician’s job. Alberta Health Services also describes the role as assembling surgical supply sets and carts, checking equipment function and helping make sure instruments are ready for both scheduled and emergency procedures.

It is precise work. There are standards to follow, equipment to operate, quality checks to complete and details that matter every single time. MDR technicians may work independently for stretches of the day, but they are also part of a much bigger team that includes nurses, physicians and other healthcare professionals.

And here is the part students may not realize: this is patient care, even though most of it happens far from the bedside.

Every properly prepared instrument supports the person who will eventually need it.

So if you are the kind of person who notices details, likes things done properly, enjoys working with equipment, can follow a process and likes knowing your work has a clear purpose, this is one healthcare career worth knowing about.

Because sometimes “working in healthcare” looks very different from what you pictured.

Here’s one you may not have thought of.Medical Device Reprocessing Technician.It is one of those healthcare careers that...
09/17/2026

Here’s one you may not have thought of.

Medical Device Reprocessing Technician.

It is one of those healthcare careers that can stay almost invisible until someone points it out. Yet the work matters every day: helping make sure the instruments and equipment used in patient care are properly cleaned, inspected, prepared and ready for use.

For a student who likes detail, precision, equipment, routines, problem-solving, and knowing their work matters, this is worth a closer look.

And here is the useful part: RhPAP is giving rural Alberta high school students, parents and teachers a chance to learn about the career directly in a free online session on Monday, September 28 from 4:30–5:30 p.m.

That is exactly why we started this series.

You do not have to know your whole future yet. You just need chances to discover what is out there.

Students, come curious. Parents, if this sounds like someone you know, send it their way.

Sometimes the right career starts with hearing the name for the first time.

How many healthcare careers can you name?Most of us can get through the familiar ones pretty quickly: doctor, nurse, pha...
09/16/2026

How many healthcare careers can you name?

Most of us can get through the familiar ones pretty quickly: doctor, nurse, pharmacist, paramedic. After that, though, the picture starts to get a lot more interesting.

At the 2024 Barrhead high school healthcare event, local students had the chance to see just how many different kinds of work fit under the word healthcare. Some roles are very visible. Others happen in labs, treatment areas, diagnostic spaces, rehabilitation settings, or behind the scenes where most of us rarely think to look.

And this is where it gets personal.

Maybe you like science, but you do not picture yourself becoming a doctor. Maybe you are good with your hands, like technology, notice details other people miss, stay calm when things get busy, or just know you want work that matters. Healthcare has room for far more kinds of people — and far more kinds of jobs — than most students ever hear about.

Sometimes the surprise is the career itself. Sometimes it is realizing, Wait… I could actually be good at that.

That is the question we want to keep opening up: What else is out there?

Parents, you have a role here too. You do not need to know every profession or every training program. Sometimes the most useful nudge is simply, “Have you ever looked into that?”

We’re going to keep bringing some of those lesser-known paths into view, along with opportunities to explore them and ask better questions about what might fit.

Because figuring out what comes after high school gets a whole lot easier when you know how many options are actually on the table.

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