Tomorrow morning (01/12/2020) at 11am on the Dáil plinth Solidarity- People Before Profit TDs will hold a media conference on the groupings Private Members Motion (See Below) on Student Nurses and Midwives which is to be debated in the Dáil on Wednesday this week.
Richard Boyd Barrett TD, Mick Barry TD, Gino Kenny TD, Bríd Smith TD and Paul Murphy TD will be in attendance.
Dáil Éireann Notes
– that 4000 students nurses and midwives have been working on the frontline in the midst of the Covid19 pandemic;
– that these students are carrying out essential work and are compensating for the long term understaffing of our health service as well as covering for Covid related absences of qualified staff
– that 11,369 health care workers have been infected with covid-19, 16.6% of all cases, 59 of whom were admitted to ICU ;
– that the chronic understaffing of our health service was a problem before the pandemic and that the necessary measures to address this understaffing have not been addressed by successive governments;
– that these students were briefly paid at Health Care Assistant (HCA)rate in the spring, in recognition of the essential nature of the work but that this payment has since ceased and they now receive no payment for their work;
– that furthermore, the financial cost to the students of carrying out this essential work is sizeable with many students paying well over and above their travel and accommodation allowances to simply be able to attend the workplace;
– that the personal and mental health cost to these student nurses and midwives working in such high stress and high pressured jobs is enormous as well as the obvious risks to their health and the health of their family and/or those they live with;
– that even before the Covid 19 crisis, the role these students were playing in their placements was more essential work than training;
– that these students are actually paying for the “privilege” of doing unpaid work on their placements with fees of between €3,000 and €7,500
– that the vast majority of these students are women and that their exploitation is also a reflection of gender inequality;
– that these students utterly refute the recent claim by Minister Donnelly, that his refusal to pay them for their placement work is in order to “protect their education”
– that student nurses and midwives assert their education has never been protected while on placement because of the burden of essential nursing and care work, alongside academic work, while simultaneously needing to do other jobs to survive financially;
– that during the covid pandemic, the opportunity to work in other jobs to earn income and generally survive has been largely cut off because of the risk of bringing covid infection in or out of their hospital placement;
– that the health services across the country have faced huge difficulties in recruiting and retaining staff for many years, due to the chaos and underresourcing across the health service, the low pay and the long hours of work;
– that many nurses, midwives and doctors emigrate to Australia and other countries, where the pay is higher and the conditions are more favourable;
– that a survey in 2018 showed that 71% of 4th year student nurses and midwives were considering leaving the country, that 79% of them identified increases in pay and improvements in staffing and working conditions as the required incentives to retain nurses and midwives in the public services, and that 76% of them found that staffing levels are not adequate to support the learning of student nurses and midwives in the clinical setting.
Therefore, calls on the Government ;
– to immediately reinstate the payment of student nurses and midwives who are doing placements during the pandemic at HCA rate;
– to urgently engage with student nurses and midwives and their union representatives to establish a bursary or payment system that will fully acknowledge the work they do in our health service and will cover the costs of travel and accommodation for the length of their placements;
– to abolish all fees for students who are training to work in the frontline of the health service in order to stem the “brain drain” and allow the HSE to recruit a sufficient number of staff to run our health service at safe and adequately staffed levels;
– parity of pay, conditions and esteem for nurses and midwives with all other paramedical graduates including the 37 hour week;
Richard Boyd Barrett, Mick Barry, Gino Kenny, Paul Murphy, Bríd Smith
