The Registered Nurses’ Union will be holding the newly-elected PC government to the health care promises made during the election campaign.

RNU President Yvette Coffey says she’s looking forward to sitting down with Tony Wakeham and the new health minister to discuss a number of commitments and promises made while on the hustings.

One of those promises was the development of an Independent Health Sector Safety Council to address violence and workplace injuries in the health care sector, and to complete the ongoing job classification project.

She says they also want to see the RNU’s travel locum pilot, currently in place in the Labrador-Grenfell Zone, expanded across the province. Staff-patient ratios is something they want looked at and “hours of work. We all know that truckers and pilots all have a maximum number of hours that they can be working and then they have to have a mandatory rest period, and we’re looking for that for nursing.”

The Tories also promised to reallocate the funds currently used to hire agency travel nurses. Coffey says they want to see permanent, full-time nursing positions offered to every single nursing graduate in the province.

“Just like Nova Scotia is doing,” says Coffey, “and it’s not necessarily we’re telling you where you have to work – we’re giving you opportunities to work where you want to work.”