Marie Sherlock (Labour) | Oireachtas source

Gabhaim buíochas leis an gCathaoirleach. It is good to have the Minister in the Chamber for this very important Bill and I am delighted to be seconding it. I take a very simple approach to the issue of student nurses. At the heart of this Bill is the fundamental question of what constitutes work. If we define work as a contribution by a person to the operation or functioning of a service or a facility, or the production of a good, then that gives us some insight into the situation of student nurses at this point. By definition, no worker should ever be put in a situation where he or she is forced to work without pay or without recognition of the contribution he or she has made to the particular workplace he or she finds himself or herself in.

It is also important to recognise there is a very significant distinction between a placement where somebody is shadowing a trained, experienced worker and a situation where somebody is actually working in his or her own right. The reality in Irish hospitals is that there are first-, second-, third- and fourth-year student nurses who are working. From the hundreds of stories that have come to the attention of Senator Hoey and the Senators and Deputies in the Labour Party, the reality is that these students are working on wards in this country. Students tell us about having to tend to patients on their own. A third-year student talked about having to sit and explain to a dementia patient why staff are wearing masks and having to spend time with that patient. Another said she felt she was being treated as just another number and was there to help out when staff are under pressure. A second-year student talked about being told to break the bad news to a family. A third-year student said she was given the responsibilities of a qualified midwife.

There is a reason for all of this, namely, the huge staff shortages in hospitals at this time. Over the past 12 weeks, we have had 14,322 instances of Covid among healthcare workers in our hospitals. Nurses and healthcare assistants comprise more than 50% of that number. These are figures the Minister knows well. The one to which I refer means that more 7,000 workers and their close contacts are isolating, with the vast majority having to stay out of work for a period and this is obviously putting enormous pressure on the health system. It is not realistic to expect that student nurses have the luxury of being able to shadow trained workers. They are having to work and contribute to what is being done.

The Government faces a choice of either saying that student nurses should not be working and to take a black-and-white view of this or recognising the reality that student nurses are working in hospitals because of the shortage in numbers. What I find ironic is that last March the then Government saw the need to offer healthcare assistant contracts to student nurses whose placements were suspended in recognition of the need to put as many resources as possible into the Irish hospital system. Of course, that system has ended and we now have this middle ground where student nurses are working but are being told by the Government that they are not really working.

The Minister finds himself in a situation whereby he has inherited a huge staffing deficit within the hospital system. That deficit has been massively exacerbated by the pandemic. We know there will be pressures within the hospital system over the coming years and that, because of ageing and the incidence of chronic disease, the staffing demand will be enormous. There have been repeated calls for many years by SIPTU, the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation and other unions working in the health sector, calling for a significant ramping up of recruitment, yet the pace of progress has been way too slow. The reality of why student nurses are working at the moment is that we do not have enough people working in the hospitals. We are asking the Minister to recognise that reality and to pay student nurses in the here and now.