Emer Higgins (Dublin Mid West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I appreciate the Minister of State's support and commitment to this issue. I hope to get some information today with which I can go back to the worried mums and dads in my area because I cannot keep giving them the same outdated information. I cannot keep telling them the HSE is doing its best to recruit more public health nurses, with no timeframe. There is no light at the end of the tunnel if I keep saying that. The Minister of State has confirmed on the record that no vacancies in the public health nursing team in my area have been filled. The allocation of student health nurses will be done in the next two weeks, in early June. I hope it changes things and that the HSE can encourage people to go into areas where vacancies have not been filled in a long time.

I appreciate that the Government cannot instantly create public health nurses where there are none. The Minister of State said that this is also an issue in his constituency. Dublin is not overflowing with public health nurses we can borrow but short-term measures have to be put in place to support parents and there has to be a long-term solution to fix this problem into the future. I do not see either a short-term or a long-term solution being offered by the HSE right now. It seems that if we do not keep shouting about this issue, it will fall by the wayside and public health nurse checkups may become a thing of the past. That would be an absolute shame for our society because supports for new parents, and new mothers in particular, are not exactly in abundance as it is. There is often an attitude that mothers should naturally and innately know what to do but we know that is not true. No one is born with an innate knowledge of what healthy child development looks like. Even nurses and midwives I have spoken to know how valuable their public health nurse was to them in the first few years of their babies' lives. Public health nurses love doing this work. They love meeting new parents and new babies, seeing them develop and being part of that journey. The bottom line is that more nurses must be incentivised to pursue public health nursing and qualified public health nurses need to be incentivised to work in the areas with the greatest need. It is great that the Minister of State pointed out that the recruitment of international nurses coming under his brief. Perhaps he can tell us a little more about that and how it can be used to solve this issue for my constituents.

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