Class of 2025: Nursing grad supports Tsuut’ina Health Centre with donation drive

Before he even started his clinical placement out at the Tsuut’ina Health Centre, Isaiah Bedard was already quite familiar with the community. He volunteered as an assistant basketball coach at the Seven Chiefs Sportsplex.  

“For me as an Indigenous youth, what’s missing on a lot of Indigenous reserves are spaces to have activities,” says the UCalgary nursing graduand. 

Bedard is from the Piikani First Nation in Southern Alberta. He went to school in Calgary and says nursing first interested him after he took a sports medicine class in Grade 11 at Bishop O’Byrne High School.  

“I found that really fun and interesting — just learning about injuries and how to treat them — that's when I thought nursing would be good just because it's more a wider scope,” he says.   

Relationship building at Tsuut'ina Health and Wellness Services  

In his final semester at UCalgary, Bedard did his final practicum placement at Tsuut’ina Health and Wellness Centre. He experienced everything from school immunizations to supporting the child and maternal health program and working with the teams in diabetes prevention and mental health.  

Joel Fischer, associate director of health at Tsuut’ina Health and Wellness Services, was Bedard’s preceptor, providing supervision and helping to bridge the gap between academic theory and real-world practice. He says the health centre supports 2,400 nation members and nearly 1,600 non-nation citizens who live on nation or with family who also access services. 

• Read more profiles of amazing Class of 2025 graduates 

There’s a family practice doctor’s clinic open five days a week, an Aboriginal Diabetes Initiative that focuses on diabetes prevention and food security, a mental health program as well as on-site lab services now run and operated at the health centre for walk-ins.  

“Indigenous public health is something that I think is either not understood very well or it's not seen as maybe the same as acute care hospital settings,” says Fischer. “We’re trying to streamline services and lower barriers to access to improve continuity of care. 

"We’re in a space where we’re bringing programs back together and de-siloing the system we have; a lot of those silos are largely in place from colonial government funding historically.” 

Fischer says Bedard is the first nursing student from UCalgary in quite some time to do a placement at the centre. 

“The staff fought over who gets Isaiah for the day. He’s been phenomenal. He’s got great initiative and he’s really excited to be participating and getting out in the community. 

“Isaiah's very good in recognizing this is the preventive side, this is where we can do more systemic change and actually do the high-level work that supports folks from having to get into the acute system.” 

Bedard says he enjoys the relationship-building aspect of community health nursing. “You’re trying to prevent the worst outcome of people ending up in the hospital and having to deal with just the hospital in general. For a lot of Indigenous people, the hospital is not a good experience so being able to support them even before that were to happen is such a great way to intervene.” 

Leading a donation drive

One of the main projects Bedard led during his clinical placement was a donation drive to provide extra support for the existing health programs at the Tsuut’ina Health Centre.  

“It involved talking to the various groups and then just understanding their needs,” says Bedard. 

Donation bins were set up at the Tsuut’ina Health Centre lobby, in the Professional Faculties building in the Faculty of Nursing’s main office and in the Indigenous Students Circle office at Writing Symbols Lodge at UCalgary. Bedard even came to speak to first-year nursing students in the Faculty of Nursing’s NRSG 202, an Indigenous Health Studies course. As a part of an assignment for that class, first-year nursing students supported the drive. 

“In total, I think I got four full carloads worth with various donations such as clothes, art supplies and hygiene products,” he says. “I was honestly very surprised from how much was donated into the bins I set up on campus. The bins that I set up in the Writing Symbols Lodge were overflowing with donations.” 

Bedard also worked with the home care team out at Tsuut’ina. “It was such an amazing privilege to be allowed into their homes. One memorable experience with home care was receiving some dried meat as a thank you gift from one of the clients.” 

Gaining confidence with undergraduate role

Bedard has already passed his nursing NCLEX exam (a standardized exam required for nursing graduates to become licensed as Registered Nurses or Licensed Practical Nurses) and says convocation time feels very surreal. “In my third year, I felt like I had this big feeling of imposture syndrome of ‘I’m just a baby nurse, I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t belong here. But as time went on, my UNE [Undergraduate Nursing Employee] job helped too, it made me more confident that I can handle nursing.”  

As he crosses the stage in June, Bedard’s advice for nursing students to have a good relationship with patients and to be their person of support. “Build that with all your patients and clients, that’s the most important and gratifying part of nursing. 

“Being a nurse was the first time I was able to really assess a problem and bring it up and see the outcomes of it,” he says.  It made me feel like a detective sort of, having to figure out what’s going on with my patient.” 

After graduation, Bedard says he wants to stay in community health and ideally work with youth. 

“The goal for me would be to work with Indigenous communities and to build health programs that really support and empower them. I really want to focus on that building capacity within people. I do believe that Indigenous youth have to break that intergenerational trauma.”