Welcome, Maria—that we had an opportunity to connect and chat about our health care system.

Speaker, I want to share Maria’s story, as I think it is important that all of us legislators listen to the voices of the future generation of nurse leaders. Maria is currently in her fourth year of nursing, doing her consolidation and working full-time at Victoria Hospital in London at the pediatric in-patient unit. Here is her story:

“I decided to apply to nursing very late in my high school career; but what inspired me to go into nursing are the rewarding interactions with people from diverse backgrounds. I think nursing is unique because it connects science and theory and views the patient through a more holistic perspective. During placement I was able to put into action what I learned in school and learn a lot more ‘on the job’ rather than through textbooks. Nursing goes beyond textbooks and it’s the hands-on skills that make me feel confident within my abilities as a student. You also learn things that aren’t mentioned in the hospital such as the conversations I would hear as a student about nurses debating on which patient takes priority over a bed regardless of both of them being equally sick or in need of care. While some days as a student I feel relaxed as a lot of the respiratory cases have gone down and the shifts are less chaotic,” sometimes “I myself have felt and heard from nursing student colleagues that it would be nice if nursing students were also compensated for working full-time jobs while also being full-time students. Regardless I would not have chosen any other field; the feeling of excitement or sense of reward I have felt after helping a patient with relieving their symptoms or even being with them throughout their journey as a patient cannot be replaced or be provided in any other field.”

Maria, I want to thank you for your commitment to Ontario’s patients. Thank you for choosing nursing and for sharing your story with us. I wish you very well as you enter the exciting and rewarding career of nursing.

Speaker, with my remaining time, I’d like to outline the three pillars and what they mean to Ontarians.

Pillar 1: the right care in the right place. We have expanded the role of pharmacists to allow them to prescribe for 13 common ailments, such as hay fever, oral thrush, pink eye, dermatitis, acid reflux, cold sores, urinary tract infections and insect bites, to name a few. This will allow patients convenient access to care while off-loading some of our primary care clinics. We are also supporting end-of-life care by adding new hospice beds to the 500 beds already available. The ER is no place for a patient to spend the last days of life, and it certainly is not a place for ER nurses to palliate patients. Building a robust hospice palliative care network is more important today than ever.

The second pillar, faster access to care, under which the government is investing $18 million into existing surgical and diagnostic centres, will allow thousands of patients access to these much-needed procedures. As a nurse working in the ER, it is devastating to see patients coming in after a few years of not being able to see their family physician due to the pandemic. They are coming in with aches or pains in a certain area, and upon investigation, we are finding aggressive, late-stage tumours and cancers. These cancers could have been caught much sooner had the patients had access to one of these 800 existing centres, and their prognoses could have been much better. These patients cannot wait any longer. We need to clear the backlogs, and we need to clear them now. This investment into 49,000 hours of MRI and CT scans—these are not just talking points. These represent cancers caught earlier and lives of Ontarians prolonged.

Interjections.

Finally, the third pillar, hiring more health care workers: I’m so proud that the last year, 2022, has seen a record high number of registrations under the College of Nurses of Ontario—12,000 nurses, a record high number, have entered the profession. Despite the rhetoric coming from the opposite side about how nursing is not a great profession and there’s such a crisis discouraging our young people from entering into the profession, we have seen 12,000 nurses register under the College of Nurses of Ontario. We’re also fast-tracking internationally trained nurses. We are leading the charge. We’re the only jurisdiction that is currently doing that in Canada, and 5,000 internationally educated nurses are on track to work in our health care system.

Finally, very excitingly, we are building two brand new medical schools. In decades, we have not built medical schools in Ontario. One of them is coming in my region of Peel, in Brampton—the Toronto Metropolitan University medical school—and I can’t wait to see the first cohort of medical students enrolled there.

In closing, Speaker, nothing is more important to people than their health. Time and health are the two precious assets that we don’t recognize and appreciate until they have been depleted. Let us use the time we have been given here, the privilege to serve in this House—let us use this time wisely. Let’s not allow it to be depleted, and let’s continue protecting our precious asset, which is our health and our health care system.

I’ll take this opportunity to educate the member opposite about our learn and stay program. This is an innovative program. For the first time in the history of this province, the government is actually paying the full cost of tuition and textbook expenses for nurses who choose to go to school in those far and remote areas. I wish that program was available to me when I was a nursing student, but unfortunately the previous government did not have such foresight. Perhaps if they had, we wouldn’t be in the position we are in today.

However, once the student graduates—we have also expanded this program to allow paramedics and lab technicians in addition to nurses to access the learn and stay program—they actually have to commit to working in that community for at least two years of service. And we’re hoping that this will encourage these practitioners to fall in love with those communities and actually stay.

This is a concrete action that this government has done that no other governments have done in the past.