The Lawrence S. Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing is the nursing school of the University of Toronto. It is based in the Health Sciences Building in the Discovery District of downtown Toronto, and hosts programs on both the university's St. George and Mississauga campuses.
The University of Toronto has provided nursing education since 1920, when educator E. Kathleen Russell established the former Department of Public Health Nursing with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. Prior in 1905, the Graduate Nursesâ Association of Ontario submitted a memorandum requesting that the University of Toronto offer a course of training and education for nurses, the first documented evidence of efforts to establish university education for nurses in Canada. The School of Nursing as it exists today was founded when the department merged with the School of Hygiene in 1933, with Russell at its first director. Following her vision of progressive reform in nursing education, it hosted the first four-year Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BScN) program in Canada.
The first integrated nursing degree program in Canada was started at the University of Toronto in 1942, where nursing faculty had control over education at the university and the teaching within the hospitals. That same year, Kathleen Russell chaired the first meeting of the Provisional Council of University Schools and Departments of Nursing (PCUSDN), as one of 11 representatives from university schools of nursing. During the 1940s, U of T was one of five Canadian universities offering nursing degrees, alongside McGill University, Université de Montréal, University of Western Ontario and Université Laval. U of T's first masters program in nursing was established in 1975 and its first doctoral program in 1993.
In 2007, Lawrence Bloomberg made a $10-million gift to the faculty, the largest private donation to a nursing school in Canada at the time. The faculty was named the Lawrence S. Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing in his honour.
The university plans to expand the undergraduate nursing (BScN) program to its Mississauga campus beginning in 2026. The planned Scarborough Academy of Medicine and Integrated Health (SAMIH) at the Scarborough campus is expected to open for students in the Nurse Practitioner program in 2027. These expansions to the university's suburban campuses follow significant growth of the Greater Toronto Area and demand for an increased number of health care professionals.
Bloomberg Nursing offers a Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BScN) as its only undergraduate program. Graduate programs offered by the faculty include:
The University of Toronto was ranked fourth in the world and first among public institutions in North America for nursing in Quacquarelli Symonds' QS World University Rankings by Subject 2025, below Johns Hopkins University, the University of Pennsylvania, and King's College London.