Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Twenty years ago, we moved from an apprenticeship model of nurse education to a degree model. It was a fundamental shift and transformation in nurse education, sought by the nursing profession, particularly the nurses' unions. I introduced it myself as Minister for Health and Children. It was important in giving a higher degree of respect to the nursing profession within the overall health service hierarchy. This debate has been very much politicised and characterised by short-termism. It has been designed to put one group of politicians into one corner and another group in another via a simplistic motion that seeks to resolve the issue of public service pay and the critical issue of how best to educate medical and nursing students right across the health area. Essentially, what the Deputy is saying is that we should return to the apprenticeship model, which I do not think is a good idea. No student nurse should be exploited. First-year students are not meant to be treating Covid patients, and they are not meant to be treating patients, full stop. Their education in clinical placements should be protected. If it is not protected, it is unacceptable. As far as I am concerned, no exploitation of student nurses should or will be accepted by the Government.

At the heart of this is the question of whether we now want to protect the learning experience of nurses on the degree programme or allow ourselves to drift back to yesteryear, to 20 odd years ago and preceding decades, to the apprenticeship model, which was not ideal at all for student nurses at that particular time and which led to repeated calls for modernisation. We were asked to bring nurse education into the 21st century. I have spoken to the heads of nursing in some of the colleges, and I have spoken to the Chief Nursing Officer. This is an important point. I have absolutely no issue with reviewing, at a macro level, the question of whether we want to retain or evaluate the nursing degree programme in terms of protecting learning for students into the future. I am up for that. I believe we should do so because it is 18 years since the programme was created. In the interim, fourth-year nursing students get paid for the 36 weeks of their internship. First, second and third-year students do not; they get allowances and so on. The Minister has indicated that there is a review whose authors will report by the end of December 2020, which will deal with an increase in allowances for first, second and third-year students. The fourth-year student wage, which is up to €21,000 or €22,000 per annum, is also up for review. This is an immediate review with an independent chairperson who will verify the findings. Negotiations with the INMO have been ongoing, even prior to last week's vote. Prior to that vote, as the Deputy knows, the Government took a decision that the pandemic unemployment payment would be available to student nurses who could not do the part-time work in which they would have been engaged because of Covid-19 and the fear of cross-contamination and so on.

The payment is now available, as agreed between the Minister for Health, Deputy Stephen Donnelly, and the Minister for Social Protection, Deputy Humphreys. That was decided at last week's Cabinet meeting and is available to student nurses.

One nurse educator, the head of a particular college, said to me that this is critical from our perspective. Everything we fought for over the past 20 years is now at risk if we go back to thinking it is okay for nurse students to do every type of job in the hospital when they are meant to be learning. We have advanced nurse education in this country and brought it into the 21st century. That is the case not only at undergraduate level, but also at postgraduate level. That is important in terms of the professionalisation of women in the health service and the professionalisation of nursing. Nursing is no longer a poor relation to other professions within the health arena. That is ultimately at the core of this debate, if we want to go down a particular road.

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