Malcolm McDiarmid must be the only nurse practitioner (NP) in Ontario whose first career steps included heating/air conditioning installer and marine biologist.

But that’s not the only thing that makes the longtime Waypoint health-care professional one of a kind. He’s in such high demand that a unique mode of transportation has been recommended to help him move around the hospital more quickly.

“One of the nurses joked they were going to put in to get me a Segway,” he said with a laugh. “My phone is pretty busy.”

McDiarmid’s duties include assessing, diagnosing, prescribing, treating, ordering diagnostic investigations, educating and consulting, referring to specialists, and collaborating with patients and families to identify risk factors and health problems, as well as make plans for treatment and prevention. He is the primary health-care lead in the Awenda, Brébeuf and Sans Souci forensic programs, which provide care to men from across Ontario who have a mental illness and have become involved with the criminal justice system.

“It’s very much a meld of nursing and medicine,” he said. “Primary care, preventative care — but in this setting you get a lot more urgent stuff that you’d never see in a clinic.” This can include responding to patients suffering from strokes or heart attacks, as well as internal medicine, which involves the prevention, diagnosis, treatment and management of more complex chronic conditions.

McDiarmid was born in Scotland, but grew up in the Collingwood area. After graduating high school, he worked as an HVAC installer before moving to the East Coast to give marine biology a try. Only after returning to Ontario did he consider health care: “Honestly, I didn’t have a clue what a nurse did.”

Nonetheless, he applied and was accepted into the three-year nursing program at Georgian College. The first year was a bit of a shock, but he eventually found his groove thanks to clinical placements in a fast-paced emergency department and an intensive-care unit. After graduating in 1994, he worked as a registered nurse in Mississippi, on a fly-in reserve northwest of Sioux Lookout, and at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. He also found time to earn a Bachelor of Science in Nursing and Primary Care NP Program from Ryerson University, and then completed the University of Ottawa’s Masters Science of Nursing program and, most recently, the Certificate in Hospital and Acute Care for Nurse Practitioners at the University of Toronto.

He eventually landed at the Barrie Community Health Centre. He spent 13 years there as an NP before applying to Waypoint in 2013. “I didn’t have a lot of mental-health training. And this was probably the best place to come for that,” he said.

Looking back at his early Waypoint days, he said it was stressful and challenging, but also an enjoyable change given the wider range of patients’ medical needs and the more unpredictable hospital environment.

“I’m not the kind of person who likes to sit around,” he said. “I’d rather be out seeing patients.”