Mr. Speaker, nurses recognize their part in creating and maintaining quality health care.
Nurses traditionally and even today are predominately female. As a result, they have had to fight for wages that truly reflect the value of the service they provide.
Nurses are not personal care hostesses, as Premier Ralph Klein suggested a few years ago. They are professionals, dedicated and committed to the well-being of human kind.
Nurses everywhere have been made to suffer as a result of government cuts to health care. They suffer from workload fatigue and are stressed from worry over how to deliver quality care with limited resources. They are denied job and economic security by the casualization of nursing positions. Is it any wonder we are facing a nursing shortage?
Governments and employers have a responsibility to foster environments and work conditions that promote a quality of life for nurses. That is a sure way of increasing entrants into nursing programs, of enticing nurses back into the profession, of recruiting nurses and, finally, of retaining nurses.
Let us begin to repair the damages by offering nurses decent wages and working conditions.