Davis wants to know which nurses will walk

If Victorian nurses carry out their threat to quit en masse, they will be endangering patients' lives, Health Minister David Davis says.

Mr Davis says the Australian Nursing Federation should come clean and identify where the thousands of nurses threatening to quit come from so that individual health services can put in place plans to look after patients.

"As if it wasn't enough to close one in three hospital beds across the state, Victorian patients and their families will suffer once again at the hands of the ANF union if it conceals from health services the number of resignations it holds - and the locations that will be affected," Mr Davis said in a statement to AAP on Tuesday.

The statement comes at the end of the 90-day period when Fair Work Australia terminated the nurses protected industrial action so negotiations could take place.

Mr Davis said that during the dispute with the government over pay and conditions, the ANF, led by Victorian state secretary Lisa Fitzpatrick, had shown a blatant disregard for the welfare of its members.

"Many of our hard-working nurses are working to support their families," Mr Davis said.

"I ask Lisa Fitzpatrick this. Will the ANF union provide pay packets from its public donation fund to the unemployed nurses she has blackmailed into resigning? "

Ms Fitzpatrick told AAP that Mr Davis should stop trying to spook nurses and concentrate on solving the dispute.

The ANF is concerned about the government's plans to abolish nurse patient ratios, replace nurses with health assistants and cut nurses' hours by introducing four-hour and split shifts.

"It will be (Premier Ted) Baillieu's lottery as to what a patient will get," Ms Fitzpatrick said.

"They will not know whether they have got a three-year registered nurse or a three-month health assistant in our acute system and that's unsafe."

Mr Davis said the Health Department and the state's hospitals have contingency plans to ensure that services can continue to maintain safe and appropriate patient care if there is a mass resignation of nurses.

"This is consistent with firm steps we took last year to protect patient safety when it was under threat from thousands of bed closures that would have resulted from the ANF union's industrial campaign," Mr Davis said.

"I expect the ANF to provide sufficient notice of these resignations to ensure these arrangements can be fine-tuned."

Nurses are seeking an 18.5 per cent pay rise over three years and eight months while the government is offering a 2.5 per cent annual rise, with any further increases to be offset by productivity measures.