Patrick Costello (Dublin South Central, Green Party)
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The apprenticeship model is excellent and will certainly help with recruitment. Again, however, many of social work courses, for example, have vacancies in them. The colleges are not able to fill the courses themselves. It is not like the social work profession or colleges are trying to keep it as a finite resource. Students are not even going into college. One of the big challenges is that they will not be paid for their placement whereas nurses are. There is always going to be a recruitment challenge if we are not training enough people. We are not training enough people because we are not paying and making training affordable for them. I look at recommendation 7 where it states they must be paid for their placement work. The apprenticeship model may get us there for some of the way, but it does not address the recommendation as a whole, which would be a positive thing to raise with the HSE and the Department.