Seán Kyne (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Mr. Gloster and the team. A headline last week in the Connacht Tribuneat home in Galway stated Australia has embarked on a recruitment drive to attract nurses and midwives to relocate from Galway and the west. Recruiters from two New South Wales districts are hosting an information session and interviews in Galway as we struggle to fill nursing vacancies. This is not new. There have been similar headlines over the past ten years in different parts of the country. There are also headlines urging the HSE to poach back nurses from the UK and Australia. It goes to show nursing and midwifery is an international issue. We have seen the moving parts. We talk about cost of living and quality of life and those issues impact on the decisions.

It struck me when reference was made to what we used to call the nurses’ homes. Could we look at that across all our campuses, particularly for new recruits as an incentive? It could incentivise nurses if they were told they had a number of years at low rent while saving for a deposit on a house. Would that work or at least improve the situation in terms of keeping nurses here and attracting them? There is capacity in other places. There are pressures in the building sector but this is something we could plan for. The universities are doing it for student accommodation. That model would assist in the attractiveness of the offering from the HSE.