NURSING DEBT

Re “Chief nursing officer Leigh Chapman brings her outsider experience to fight for Canada’s struggling nurses” (March 18): One way to make nursing a more attractive career choice: Remove the heavy burden of student loans from nursing students.

It takes four years to train a nurse. When I was a financial-aid adviser at the British Columbia Institute of Technology, I discovered that half our nursing students were already well above the average student debt load, and accumulating more.

The federal and provincial governments have student-loan forgiveness programs for doctors and nurses who serve in public clinical settings for five years in underserved communities. Isn’t it time to declare the whole country underserved and further extend student-loan forgiveness to nurses and other health care workers?

The prospect of an education that allows someone to graduate debt-free would be a powerful recruitment tool to attract young Canadians to health care careers.

■ Connie Gibbs

Salt Spring Island, B.C.