Nursing the health of a country: Fred Montpetit’s career has taken him far and wide
Posted on Thursday, February 15th, 2018
“Never limit yourself, seize new opportunities when they present themselves, and your career can take you anywhere you can dream.”
Those are Frederick Montpetit’s words of advice for students in Nursing, the Algonquin College program he graduated from in 2001. Moreover, they are words he has lived by.
Nursing has taken Montpetit to Canada’s far north, far west and dead centre, and opened the door to rich experiences that even this adventurous alumnus might not have imagined. It is the style of learning fostered by the Nursing program that made his diverse career possible, Montpetit explains — though he didn’t appreciate it at the time.
“Through a good part of my first and second year, I remember thinking, ‘God, I wish they’d give up on this problem-based learning. I wish they would just tell me what I need to know to graduate,’” he recalls. “Instead, my professors… put a problem in front of me and said, ‘OK, solve it.’ And I hated it.”
“And then I went on to the real world where you’ve not been trained in every circumstance, so you need to find the answer,” Montpetit says. “They taught us in the Nursing program how to think, and they taught how to learn, and I am so grateful because it doesn’t matter what the circumstances (are), I have the skillset to go find an answer.”
That skillset served him well as an emergency nurse in a Winnipeg hospital right after graduation. When the opportunity arose, he was also well prepared to adapt to the health care challenges in the remote Nunavut community of Rankin Inlet. Hired as a community health care nurse, Montpetit’s problem-solving abilities had him rising the administrative ranks of his profession. After a stint as regional manager of public health, he was tapped by the territorial government to serve as a nursing director in Nunavut’s Health and Social Services department.
In 2008, Montpetit was named to the newly created position of Chief Nursing Officer for Nunavut, responsible for forming and implementing nursing policy and strategy in the territory – a place where frontline nurses play a significant role in health care.
Two years ago, after 11 years in the north, Montpetit moved to Ucluelet on the outer west coast of Vancouver Island, where he practices once again as a hands-on community health care nurse.
“It’s been a delightful change because it’s a return to engaging people,” Montpetit says, noting that’s why he got into nursing in the first place. His College experience is front-of-mind these days: in September, he was honoured as an Algonquin College Alumni of Distinction, receiving the 2017 Health Sciences award; and he was also the institution’s Health Sciences nominee for the 2017 Premier’s Awards.
“Algonquin taught us as nursing students to be holistic, to look at the entire person. You’re not looking at a fractured limb, you’re not looking at a cut arm, but you are looking at a person — and that fractured limb has an impact of their life that affects all different pieces of it.”
You might say Montpetit’s experience of his profession is also holistic – from providing primary health care to making the policy that makes the delivery of health care effective. “Nursing is so broad and so deep and it spans such a huge scope,” he says. Future graduates shouldn’t limit themselves, he says.
That sounds like healthy advice.