Just before Thanksgiving weekend in 2020, Bill Rutherford was told he had to create a microcredential course at Red River College in Winnipeg on the collection of nasopharyngeal samples. Rutherford, the college’s business development manager, had just a week to get it up and running. COVID-19 case counts were rising sharply and Manitoba was expanding its PCR (polymerase chain reaction) testing capacity, which relies on trained workers placing long swabs deep into a person’s nasal passage. “It was the province recognizing we’re going to have to pull people in from other health professions to aid the nurses and frontline workers who had been doing the job,” he recalls.
Read the full article from Maclean’s here.
