Ontario nurses “hit the streets,” so to speak, last Sunday.
Members of the Ontario Nurses Association (ONA) held a community “day of action,” asking the public to support them and join in their fight for better care.
In Deep River, ONA local president Corina David and her colleagues were set up with an information table in the public space downtown beside Giant Tiger.
In addition to seeking public support for nurses in their current negotiations for a new provincial contract, David said they also wanted to invite people “to express what better care means to them.”
“For us nurses, we know better care equates with better working conditions, safe staffing and nurse retention, so that we can keep junior nurses in the profession,” she said.
David said there has been “an astounding ratio of nurses” leaving the profession between the ages of “30 and 40 or thereabouts, right in that middle range where they have higher educational already.”
“But now they’re discovering that the working conditions and the unsafe (health care) settings sometimes makes it impossible to provide safe patient care,” she said.
“So, we are doing all of this in support of keeping our public funded health care system alive”…
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