The following statement was given today in the House of Assembly by the Honourable Tom Osborne, Minister of Health and Community Services:

Speaker, I rise in this Honourable House to celebrate the opening of new Memorial University Faculty of Nursing learning sites in Gander and Grand Falls-Windsor.

Sites outside of Memorial’s St. John’s campus, such as Gander, Grand Falls-Windsor, Corner Brook, and Happy Valley-Goose Bay, create opportunities for students who want to become nurses to receive their education closer to home.

We take great pride in increasing opportunities for people to earn their nursing degrees. We also take great pride in the number of nurses who we have recruited to work in Newfoundland and Labrador.

This year, every nursing graduate was offered employment opportunities to work here in the province. Since April, 239 new nurses have been hired. That is in addition to 545 new nurses hired between April 2022 and March 2023.

We continue to provide significant financial incentives, including signing bonuses, education bursaries and incentives for nurses working abroad who want to return home.

We are also focused on retention. We have offered retention bonuses earlier this year totalling $10 million, incentives to nurse practitioners who commit to work in family care teams, and have implemented recommendations from our collaboration on the nursing think tank.

All of this is the result of our government’s plans to transform our health system.

We encourage nursing students, graduates, and nurses who work abroad to visit www.workinhealthnl.ca to learn more about the ways we are working to add more nurses to our health care system.