Halifax native embracing life in county as he settles into nursing career

July 23, 2024

When Liam Whitty first moved to Inverness County, he found the area quite solitary, especially compared to bustling Halifax where he is from.

“It felt very quiet, very distant,” he says.

But Whitty quickly realized that any boredom in a place like Cape Breton, with its beautiful landscape and vibrant culture, is self-inflicted.

“If you’re a little outgoing and make the effort to get involved, you will never ever have a bored moment during your time here,” he says.

A lover of hiking and being outdoors, he told The Participaper in an interview that he found the right place to call home, at least for the time being.

“I will never run out of places to explore here,” he adds.

Whitty is a licensed practical nurse (LPN) at Inverness Consolidated Memorial Hospital and is currently working on the medical surgical floor. The department sees everything from day surgery and post-operation recovery patients, through the gamut of illnesses, to end-of-life patients waiting for placement in long term care facilities.

Working in a rural hospital allows him to learn and explore a range of nursing skills.

“It’s a fantastic place to pick up experience when you’re starting out and you’ll see a little bit of everything,” he says.

Before nursing, he worked as a cook for many years and says the transition into healthcare was a natural choice for him.

“Cooking comes with certain connotations of being a lifetime renter, never owning a car, or anything like that,” he says. “I’ve stayed in kitchens for a better part of 15 years.”

For Whitty, other pressures came into life as well, “where you start to need to step up and do a little bit more for your family – like people getting sick and feeling a need to actually do something about it.”

Whitty graduated from nursing school in March 2020, cusping the brink of the pandemic. His introduction into the healthcare sector was during one of the most globally unprecedented periods in modern history.

He hit the ground running, doing community care work out of the Inverness hospital, then moved into Integrated Care Management on the medical surgical floor, where he’s been for about two years.

During the peak of the pandemic, he was one of the few people allowed to journey into communities and people’s homes.

“The nurses and cops were the only ones on the roads,” he adds. “I definitely didn’t have a typical introduction into nursing.”

Whitty is still feeling out what he wants to specialize in, noting he’s up for anything at this stage.

“I’m still figuring it out. I’ve never thought that I would enjoy end-of-life care but, given the opportunities I’ve had to be involved with patients’ families during very important times in their entire lives, it’s proved extremely rewarding.”

“Trying to pick out a particular interest for the nursing profession when I’m this new is difficult… it’s all interesting,” he explains.

Like any job, nursing comes with its challenges.

“I feel like I’m just kind of starting to get my feet underneath me as far as my own competencies and being comfortable in the profession,” Whitty says. “The last couple of years have been a whirlwind of trying to learn the ropes.”

He admires his colleagues for their varied talents and for being able to handle a wide set of patients’ needs in a small facility.

Aside from work, being fairly new to Cape Breton also poses a unique learning curve.

“I think a challenge that everybody everywhere in Cape Breton faces is that staffing is always going to be an issue,” Whitty says, adding that healthcare employers find it difficult to find people who want to live in rural areas, especially with the current housing shortage.

But he says he’s finding solace and comradery both in work and outside of it. Living just a few minutes outside of Inverness, he says he’s learning a lot about the county’s culture and enjoys the bustling social scene among Islanders.

“Cape Bretoners are fantastically kind people and welcoming when you open up and talk to them,” he says.

“I do absolutely love it up here and I have no plans to leave anytime soon,” he says. “Even for travels in the future or opportunities that might pop up in nursing, I definitely see myself keeping Cape Breton as a home base for the rest of my life.”