Owen Sound will eventually lose a nurse practitioner, but it’ll gain a new doctor.
Sonja Bruin, who has worked as a nurse practitioner in the city for the past five years, has started medical school.
She plans to graduate in 2014, at which time she hopes to begin practicing as a doctor in her hometown.
Bruin is one of seven medical students who will receive bursaries worth 25 hundred dollars this year from the Owen Sound family physician recruitment committee.
Bruin says the decision to return to school stems from a desire to expand her knowledge and provide better medical care for her patients.
Bruin is enrolled in a distance education program through the Oceania University of Medicine, in the South Pacific, and so is one of the first beneficiaries of the expansion of the local bursary program.
Until this year, eligibility was limited to local students enrolled in medical schools in Ontario.
Now the program is open to students who are enrolled in a medical school anywhere in the world.
It’s also appropriate that Bruin receive support from the program considering her mother, Verona Jackson, has worked hard for many years to raise money for the program through initiatives like the annual Valentine’s Brunch.
Bruin’s father is former Owen Sound Mayor Ovid Jackson, who was also the Member of Parliament for Bruce Grey Owen Sound from 1993 to 2004.
The other local medical students who will receive bursaries this year are Dan Breadner, Hiran Shah, Chris Farlinger, Emily Siu, Matthew Boyle and Heidi DeBoer.
