Province provides $10M in grants to increase post-secondary spaces in mental-health programs

The Alberta legislature on Dec. 10, 2023. (Craig Ellingson/CTV News Edmonton)

The province is providing an additional $10 million over three years to add more spaces in Alberta schools to train mental-health professionals.

The Alberta government announced the increased funding to 12 post-secondary institutions on Friday in support of creating 761 more spaces in programs such as psychiatric nursing, psychology, social work, child and youth care, and addictions counselling.

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In a Friday media release, the ministry of advanced education said the new Mental Health Professions Enrollment Expansion grant program will help schools increase capacity, improve classes and "prepare a new generation of mental health professionals to meet the emerging needs of our communities."

"The reality is that we needed more seats to be made available because there is such a shortage of social workers, psychologists and other professionals," Rajan Sawhney, Alberta's minister of advanced education, told media in Calgary on Friday.

"We listened, and we put out a guideline to post-secondary institutions to send their proposals to us in terms of what they were seeing in their communities that needed to be funded."

Dr. Chad London, provost and vice-president (academic) at Calgary's Mount Royal University, said his school sees "strong demand" for programs in the mental-health field.

"With the Bachelor of Arts in Psychology, in particular, we've seen over eight applications for every seat, so the funding that we're getting today is going to help increase that capacity, meet that demand," London said Friday.

"I think there's a greater recognition (that) there's a need in society, and students want to be a part of solving that, so they're attracted to those fields."