Seventy years of training nurses at the Holy Cross Hospital

As any nursing administrator in the early years of the province would admit, a school of nursing was almost de rigueur for the operation of a hospital. Besides being a good recruitment method for its own grad nurses, it was also a major source of (cheap) labour during the students' on-the-job training. Holy Cross was no exception and its School of Nursing was opened in 1907 with five student nurses. Until 1920, the student nurses were housed in the hospital itself, but growing numbers required the purchase and renovation of two other buildings for the students. Complete with a tunnel to the hospital, they became the nursing residence until 1947, when still increasing numbers required a move into the original Holy Cross hospital building.

Always questioning whether the young students were getting adequate training, Holy Cross was one of the first schools to implement the block system in 1947. In the 1950s discussions were held regarding the possibility of central schools of nursing for Alberta. Feeling strongly that their Ethics course was important to the training of their nurses and that it might not be included, the Catholic schools of nursing rejected the idea.

In 1957 a beautiful new building was erected that could accommodate two hundred and fifty six student nurses--it was renamed the Grey Nuns Building in 1982. The Grey Nuns left the hospital in 1970 when it was sold to the Calgary Rural and Metro Hospital District No. 93. The Grey Nuns Provincial Council felt that running a hospital meant that there should be sisters in the key positions and there were fewer and fewer sisters in the organization.