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

The Deputy has deliberately distorted and misrepresented what I said on the last number of occasions. On no stage have I ever suggested that other nurses exploit student nurses. That is a complete untruth. I said any employer that would take from a student his or her full student status, which is what the nursing degree is about, and use him or her on a 13-hour roster to work and not pay him or her is responsible for that exploitation, not fellow nurses and I never said that. The Deputy knows I did not say that, but it suits her to play the politics all of the time, to distort and to tell untruths about what I said, and to apportion words to me that were never said in this House.

I want to make one point. What the Deputy does not seem to get is that what she wants is to change the nursing degree back to an apprenticeship model. First year students do nine weeks' placement, roughly. That is meant to be a clinical placement and their status is meant to be full student status. The higher education institutes and the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Ireland are clear about that. The nursing degree programme was introduced to separate out and create the status of a student as opposed to a worker. The Deputy steadfastly refuses to deal with that issue, which is at the core of this. In second year, it is a 12-week placement and in third year it is a 12-week placement, although that can vary a little in some hospitals. It is 36 weeks in year four. Students are paid in their internship year in year four.

The Government is open to, and wants to, review this. My understanding is agreement has now been reached in terms of the chair of such an immediate review. The pandemic unemployment payment is being made available to student nurses. Student nurses were paid the healthcare system rate in the first wave of Covid, given the enormous impact of that first wave on hospitalisations. That impact has not been seen in the second wave, thanks be to God. We have 210 people in hospital as of this morning compared with 800-odd in the springtime.

Fianna Fáil transformed nurse education in this country. The Deputy will never acknowledge that. It is beyond her to acknowledge it because she is too partisan. I was the Minister for Health who introduced the nursing degree programme. I introduced it because the nursing professions wanted it, the nursing unions wanted it and those involved in advancing nurse education wanted it. They wanted to transform the whole idea of nurse education, not just at undergraduate level but postgraduate as well. That happened. There was an enormous investment, which was probably the largest investment ever, in nurse education, which resulted in schools of nursing in all of our universities and in all of our institutes of technology in the regions. That was the objective.

I am very clear that a student nurse on a clinical placement is a full-time student. If a nurse is asked to do work for a roster, that nurse should be paid by the employer for such a roster. I have been making this clear now for the past number of weeks. We have a problem in that we will need to review entirely the programme. Do we want to go back to an apprenticeship model? Is that what we want to do, such that the quality of the clinical placement and the learning process is significantly reduced, which is what it is meant to be about in the first instance? A first-year nursing student on a nine-week clinical placement is not meant to be working.

He or she is not meant to be treating Covid patients at 2 o'clock in the morning. That was never meant to be the case and it should not be. Successive Governments have invested in a strong infrastructure in hospitals to protect that clinical space and clinical placements for nursing students in order that they are a genuine learning environment for them. Fourth year student nurses get paid for the 36-week placement, which is a transition period into work. We are very committed to increasing the allowances available to students and also the fourth year payment, which is separate to that, immediately. There will also be a more medium-term review of the allowances coming out of that.

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