Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Senator very much for her question. I will start by recognising the work that student nurses are doing. They are on educational placements as part of their degree programmes, are working damn hard and are doing it in a healthcare system where everyone is working damn hard. The system is under enormous pressure. In the first wave of the pandemic, when there was real fear and we shut down elective care, not only did the student nurses step up, as did everybody else such as all of our qualified nurses, they went in as healthcare assistance, HCAs, not on placement, and they just worked. Their education was essentially put aside for a while. That is a sacrifice that they made at a time they were needed and I want to acknowledge that.

The comparison with trades is not applicable. There was no degree programme for nursing prior to 2004 and most of it was on-the-job training. The nursing degree was set up in 2004 and there was a very conscious move to educational placements. Some people referred to what happened earlier in the year but there was a significant wave of Covid-19 then with many people dying and we were in the middle of a crisis. The student nurses worked as HCAs within the hospital system and, rightly, they were paid for that across the healthcare system. We are not in the middle of a crisis now. We have moved early to avoid a crisis in healthcare. Elective care as well as all of our hospitals are still open. As of this morning, there are fewer than 300 Covid-19 patients in our hospitals against the base of approximately 12,000 beds. It is a fundamentally different situation.

This is an issue that the Chief Nursing Officer, CNO, and I discuss on a very regular and ongoing basis. The strong view of myself, the Department’s, and that of the CNO is that we must protect the education of nurses. As the Senator will be aware, trainee nurses are paid in fourth year and there is a slight difference between psychiatric nurses and all other nursing grades, but it is in and around an annualised salary of €22,000 for their placement. The strong view which I support is that these are educational placements for first, second and third-year trainee nurses. Of all of the clinical students right across the system, be they doctors, allied health professionals, and everybody else, only one group receives a stipend, which is a low and modest one. This group is nurses and the stipend is €50.79.

I am very aware of the hardship being incurred at the moment. For example, many student nurses work in nursing homes at the weekend to make money that they badly need, be it to pay the bills, rent or just to buy food. That is not available to them at the moment and they are trying to do their education placements in a very different environment. There is ongoing engagement with the INMO and the Department and we are seeking significant short-term changes to the educational placement stipend to recognise that the situation that they are working is very different from a non-Covid-19 world.