Alan Kelly (Tipperary, Labour) | Oireachtas source

There is a real issue for the Minister to deal with in this regard. Many of us have had student nurses and their parents contact us to tell their stories. Their health is at risk when colleagues go out sick with Covid and they have been thrown in at the deep end, being told to go into situations they did not expect to go into, sometimes with only a day's notice and certainly no more than a week's notice. The Minister needs to put them back on the HCA rate. It is completely and utterly unfair not to do so. I have spoken to two student nurses who are finishing their training and who told me, quite bluntly, that they intend to leave this jurisdiction because of the way they are being treated. They do not have any other means of getting an income and they have loans and other borrowings. Like many others did in the past, they are making the decision to leave. This is happening because the Minister is not making the right decisions. We know that the competition for staff nurses is extreme throughout the world. The last thing we should be doing is creating circumstances that lead to our student nurses deciding to leave the country when they graduate.

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