Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy. I fully agree that nursing students need support. He refers to the HCA wage which was paid during the first wave of the pandemic. The Deputy should bear in mind that when that happened the student nurses were essentially asked to move from education to work. They were working full-time. They stepped up when they were needed and did a fantastic job in a crisis. They were paid the HCA wage. That meant they were working as HCAs and their line managers in the hospitals deployed them as HCAs. It is very important to remember that these are educational training placements. We do not want these students working as HCAs. That is not the point. These educational placements are a really important aspect of the nursing degree which was set up in 2004. I want to make very clear that they are fundamentally different. We are not asking the nurses to work as HCAs. We are asking them to do their educational training placements. We are looking at the current stipend and considering what can be done in the short term, in the context of Covid-19.

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