Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The Taoiseach says the Government is trying to recruit people to address the staffing crisis in our hospitals and our health services. The pay and numbers strategy proves that he is speaking out of both sides of his mouth on that issue. Setting that aside, however, if we are to recruit the people we need into the health service, we need to make it attractive for people to train as nurses and midwives and allied health professionals. As I have highlighted a number of times in this Dáil, in Scotland, a student nurse or midwife or in allied health professional training gets £12,000 a year as a bursary to train. There is a real incentive to do nursing and midwifery or to study to become an allied health professional. Here, student nurses and many other people, including the allied health professionals, face massive financial barriers and get very little financial assistance for transport, their accommodation costs and so on. Will the Government introduce a serious bursary of the sort available in Scotland for our student nurses and our allied health professionals who are trying to train in order to address the staffing crisis in our health service, the waiting lists, the crisis in our CDNTs and CAMHS teams and emergency departments?

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