Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly has confirmed that student nurses and midwives will receive the backdated promised pandemic placement grant of €100 per week by June 1st.
Donnelly confirmed that the government were accepting the recommendations of the report by Prof Tom Collins – commissioned by the Department of Health – which recommended that student nurses and midwives be paid €100 per week while on placement for the duration of the coronavirus pandemic.
Addressing the annual conference of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO), Donnelly said: “My department has instructed the HSE to process this payment, and I have confirmation that payments will begin from next week. Importantly, the HSE has said they would be completed by the 1st of June”.
The proposed payment works out at about €2.56 per hour for a 39-hour work week.
At the conference Donnelly confirmed that a wider review into supports for supernumerary clinical placements for student nurses and midwives would be undertaken and would examine pay for final-year interns and travel and accommodation allowances for supernumerary clinical placements.
The review, he said, has recently started and recommendations from the report will be finished by June 30th.
The proposal of the pandemic placement grant was met with disappointment by student representatives in the INMO when it was announced.
Speaking to The University Times when the Collins report recommendations were announced, Ciarán Mac an tSaoir, a student representative in the INMO, said the proposal was “very frustrating”.
“Given the scope of the issue and how big of a political issue it was, it’s really, really insignificant.”
In a press statement following the announcement of the report’s recommendations, INMO general secretary Phil Ní Sheaghdha said that student nurses and midwives “engaged in this process in good faith and are deeply disappointed in this report”.
“The COVID situation has deteriorated rapidly”, she said. “This report is already obsolete and no longer reflects the risk or work that students will be taking on in the coming weeks.”
“It’s time for the Minister to do the right thing. He should pay students the healthcare assistant rate of pay – something which was done earlier in the pandemic.”
The review envisages that approximately 4,500 students would be eligible for the grant and would retain any allowances they were already entitled to for costs such as transport.
Some 4,000 student nurses and midwives have worked on the frontline of the health service during the pandemic.
Last year, the INMO launched a petition calling on Donnelly to pay nursing interns the same rate as healthcare assistants.
Final-year nursing students are required to complete an internship before finishing their degree. Interns are currently paid the minimum wage. Over the summer, however, the government increased last year’s interns’ wages to €14.28 per hour, the same rate as healthcare assistants.
The petition also called on the government to “increase and expand” the clinical placement allowance for other students, and to provide “full health and safety protection” to students, including payment if they contract coronavirus and have to go on leave.
