WINDSOR, ONT. -- Hôtel-Dieu Grace Healthcare is putting a call out to nursing students to join their team as they tackle the COVID-19 pandemic.

Applications are now open to Registered Nurse(RN) students in their third and fourth year of studies and Registered Practical Nurses(RPN) students who are completing their last semester this term.

“We want to make sure that we have our staffing in place for what might be coming, what we expect is coming,” says Rober Moroz, incident management response team member at Hôtel-Dieu Grace Healthcare.

“It is a bit unprecedented in some ways but we’re in very different times. We have to make sure that our responsibility for patient care is met.”

The hospital is asking for students to work within their scope of practice.

“They’ll be doing more support tasks, so it might involve some charting duties, cleaning, bathing, ambulating,” says Moroz. “The students will be overseen by a registered health professional at all times.”

Students will be referred to as healthcare providers when deployed at the hospital.

“They can free up the nurses who are registered,” says Linda Patrick, dean of University of Windsor Faculty of Nursing.

With the support of the students, the hospital can reassign more Registered Nurses to critical units.

Patrick believes her students will rise to the occasion under the right environment.

“They’re going to need support, they’re going to work with teams, and they’re going to need to have guidance,” says Patrick. “They should not be putting themselves in any sort of situations they are not ready for.”

Interested students can apply by emailing their resume to the hospitals HR team at sara.tapak@hdgh.org.