Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I appreciate that the Minister of State is coming at this issue from a higher education point of view. I acknowledge his indication that there is the possibility of taking it up with the HSE, the Department of Health and the relevant line Minister. The fact of the matter is that nurses are productive from the minute they go onto a ward or into an acute hospital setting. That is the point we are making. Student nurses are taking up the slack due to the lack of capacity at this time. There is a precedent in the fact that, at the start of the pandemic in March, a payment was made to student nurses akin to the healthcare assistant payment. I call on the Government to revisit that payment scheme. It could go a long way towards staving off the possibility that some of these student nurses will be lost from the system. If people get good pay and conditions at an early stage in their career, the chances are better that they can be retained within the service instead of being lost to Australia, Dubai or the UK.

We must be more lateral in our thinking in respect of the day-to-day supports that nurses should have because we need to retain them.

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