How are the LPN employment prospects in your area?
Do you work in a hospital/public nursing home or LTC/private nursing home or LTC/doctors office/other?
What is the starting wage and top end wage for an LPN in your area?
Will you go on become an RN/BSN?
Any other interesting tidbits about being a Canadian LPN?
(I'm 30, live in the Okanagan in BC and hoping to get into the LPN course this fall. Just trying to gather some info on being an LPN accross the country :) )
Oh and just to add that AUPE PN's loose their single line overtime pay effective April 1st unless they are full time employees. Now the hospitals expect us to work every weekend. Part-timers are no longer entitled to designated days off. Expect our next contract to be hard fought. So far no other nursing staff (part-time) have lost their single slash days, something the employers told us would happen.
Never mind the house prices, what about the ever increasing property taxes and utility/user fees....
Specializes in NICU, PICU, PCVICU and peds oncology.
I hadn't heard about AUPE agreeing to let your DDOs go. How does this province expect to keep staff when they do things like that? HSBA had the same provision in their initial proposals to UNA, but I can't see UNA ever even letting it stay on the table. Bargaining is going very slowly for us, and I think it might get ugly again... but we're not really being told very much about what's happening. Our contract expires in 8 days; both sides had said they wanted to have an agreement in principle by the 31st... not going to happen.
I live in St. Albert... don't remind me about property taxes and user fees! We voted "NO" in the plebescite for the multipurpose rec centre that we'll never see the inside of, that we now have to pay a 25 year surcharge of $200+ year for. And we pay for each bag of garbage we throw out, with no curbside recycling program. (Although I have to say that we're still paying less now than we were five years ago in Winnipeg...) Of course, utilities are way a lot higher here in deregulation land. And who can make sense of those monthly statements? Direct Energy's are particularly convoluted.
Housing prices out here have really gotten out of hand, and they're only going to get worse. The economists are predicting at least a 15 % increase this year, but they said that last year and it was closer to 26%. We bought our nothing-to-write-home-about house in a suburb of Edmonton 5 years ago for $160k after being told by a realtor that we were paying too much then we put about $45k into in in renovations and it's been appraised by the bank now for $335k. With the right realtor, we could probably get even more. So I'd advise anyone who is thinking about moving out here to do it sooner rather than later. Otherwise you won't be able to afford it!
I'm in Kelowna, home of Canada's 2nd most expensive housing market. Our nothing to write home about 5 bedroom house cost $193K 6 years ago and would now go for at least 400K, with about 20K of improvements done to it. !!!!
Hey Paprikat, all of Athabasca's clinicals are in Alberta with no guarantee of where they will be. Heard of nurses in Edmonton going to Calgary and Lethbridge. Plus you have to get an Alberta LPN license.
Just warning you...
Extremely helpful information as I have been slowly researching the online bridging program from LPN to RN through Athabasca! I will look into this further. I am in second semester of my LPN program here in BC. More and more opportunities for us all which is so exciting. Just depends on where you want to live. Bonus incentives here are to move up north or some small rural island. Not sure where I will go yet. Thanks for the info.
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or some small rural island. Not sure where I will go yet. Thanks for the info.
Fiona59
8,343 Posts
Oh and just to add that AUPE PN's loose their single line overtime pay effective April 1st unless they are full time employees. Now the hospitals expect us to work every weekend. Part-timers are no longer entitled to designated days off. Expect our next contract to be hard fought. So far no other nursing staff (part-time) have lost their single slash days, something the employers told us would happen.
Never mind the house prices, what about the ever increasing property taxes and utility/user fees....