Steph Fleming – SU Welfare Officer
It’s Christmas Eve and I’ve kicked back in my parents’ house in front of a roaring fire surrounded by Christmas cheer. I decide to check my e-mail to see what work I’ll have when I get back into the office. There are two e-mails, one is a forwarded message from the INMO and the other is from another nursing student. So I glance through both e-mails and well if it wasn’t Santa telling every nursing student in the country that they’d been bad little children and were getting fewer presents this year. But Santa is forward thinking these days, he includes projections in his news – in 2012 the nurses will get fewer presents again, in 2013 fewer still, in 2014 they’ll get half the presents they got last year and in 2015 they’ll get none. One can only assume that in 2016 they’ll get coal.
What I’m talking about is the decision by An Bord Altranais to phase out wages (formerly 80% of a nurse’s minimum salary) for nursing students completing their nine-month internship in fourth year. Ah, but it’s a recession you say, we can’t pay unqualified people! What other student gets paid in their final year? What makes nurses so special? Well, I’ll tell you.
For some reason the demographics of nursing students are different from other courses – there is a higher portion of mature students, of foreign nationals, of students in receipt of the maintenance grant and of student parents than in most other level 8 courses. There is also the small matter of the amount of work they do.
Nursing students work in hospitals from their very first year. In those early days they are (like all young health science students) little more than note takers or messengers or someone to tell Mr. Smith to please put his pants back on. By second year they take an active role in patient care, they help the other professions by monitoring the patients; Did he sleep? Is she in pain? Has he had a wee? Did Mr. Murphy do his breathing exercises today? By third year they have a very real responsibility for their patients. They work 13 hour shifts, nights, weekends and all manner of holidays. They do this while writing literature reviews, submitting essays, studying for exams and often working part time jobs.
By fourth year these students have worked 2,870 hours in public hospitals without pay and are all but qualified. During their internship they are charged with the care of a ward containing around eight patients. That is eight human lives – eight sick people, eight scared people, eight occasionally angry, often disruptive, occasionally dying and in need of comfort people.
For 36 weeks they do the job that so few others will. They do things so essential to your basic quality of life that it can’t be discussed at the dinner table. They take all the abuse a patient and their family can hurl, they take all the arrogance of every surgeon and doctor they can find, they answer all the questions any medicine, physiotherapy and 1st-3rd year nursing student can throw at them. And what’s more is they are essential to the running of HSE hospitals.
Ask anyone who has worked or been treated in a public hospital in July and they will tell you it is chaotic. The only students working in these hospitals are fourth year nursing students – the med students are gone, the physio students are gone, the OTs are gone, the radiographers are gone, the nurses are the only ones who remain dutifully walking the halls – halls that are stalked by newly qualified, newly rotated interns who couldn’t find their arse with two hands and a map (seriously, these guys don’t where the canteen is let alone their patient’s chart). As a health professional I strongly recommend that you don’t get sick in Ireland in July unless you have good health insurance. Your doctors will be inexperienced and terrified and your nurses will be underpaid, overworked and rightly pissed off.
So why are nurses such a soft target? The answer is they’re not. When you push them, they push back and I’d hate to be Mary Harney when she finds that out. Actually, I’d hate to be Mary Harney ever and I’d bet my degree that there’s not a nursing student out there who disagrees with me on that.
