Victorian nurses and midwives fighting to save and improve nurse/midwife patient ratios voted this afternoon to continue to fight and take unprotected industrial action across Victoria's public hospitals.
This afternoon's meeting at Festival Hall in West Melbourne also voted to march to Parliament House on Thursday to call on Premier Baillieu to step in and fix this dispute.
Australian Nursing Federation (Victorian Branch) Lisa Fitzpatrick said: "Minister Davis has forced nurses into this position because he rejected our 4 November olive branch of gentler bans, when nurses and midwives voted to implement paperwork bans and wear T-shirts. This was designed to enable constructive talks and could have avoided bed closures and surgery cancellations from 12 November.
"Minister Davis also rejected His Honour Justice Boulton's proposal for consent arbitration which would have enabled the matters in dispute such as nurse patient ratios, the requirement to have registered and enrolled nurses and shift lengths to be included in that arbitration," Ms Fitzpatrick said.
"The ANF was agreeable to lift the bans and agree to consent arbitration, but Minister Davis rejected the Boulton solution and declared he would only be satisfied with restricted mandatory full arbitration as outlined in the secret plot he signed on 5 May," she said.
"The dispute isn't about wages, if it was we'd achieve a substantial increase, certainly above 2.5 per cent, in forced arbitration. Minister Davis's secret plot acknowledges forced arbitration could deliver significant wage increases to Victorian nurses and midwives. Despite this, Minister Davis is still pushing for forced arbitration demonstrating that more dollars are to be made by abolishing ratios than paying higher wages," she said.
"Nurses and midwives will not trade patient safety for a wage rise. Mandated minimum nurse patient ratios protect patient care," she said.
"Minister Davis has left nurses with no choice. Either they do nothing, retreat and get a 3.5 per cent wage increase and lose nurse patient ratios or they choose to protect their patients by fighting to maintain and improve their nurse patient ratios," Ms Fitzpatrick said.
Conciliation talks between the parties, with the assistance of Commissioner Gooley, resume in Fair Work Australia tomorrow morning.
Important exemptions to the bans are: emergency, neo-natal and paediatric patients, haemodialysis patients, haematology patients, maternity patients, oncology patients, palliative care patients, terminations of pregnancy, intensive care unit, coronary care units, high dependency patients (including medically indicated telemetry) and the Royal Children's Hospital and the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre.
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