Many nursing and midwifery students have been pulled from their clinical placement this week, amid the ongoing spread of the coronavirus pandemic, but final-year nurses on internships are still being required to attend.
First and third-year nursing students, who are currently on placement, will not have to attend their clinical placements for the rest of the year, and won’t have to make up for lost time during the summer, the School of Nursing and Midwifery told them this week. Second-year nursing students aren’t currently on placement.
Meanwhile, final years on internships – an arrangement that sees them paid €10.47 an hour, and requires them to make up lost time unless accompanied by a doctor’s certificate – are still attending internships that run from January to September.
In emails sent to students in the school over the last few days, Valerie Smith, the director of undergraduate teaching in the School of Nursing and Midwifery, wrote that the school has agreed that first and third students will remain off placement – a move that won’t affect their progression next year if they passed placement in the first semester and pass academic assignments this year.
First and third-years began this block of placement on March 2nd, and were due to finish on April 10th.
“You will not be required to repay these placement weeks during the summer period, although we may need to add an extra clinical week at some other point in the remaining three years of your programme”, she said.
Nursing students in Trinity’s children’s and general integrated degree programme will remain off their current placements, which will end around the beginning of April.
The school has yet to decide whether placements for these students, due to start on May 4th, will go ahead, but Smith added that “it is very likely that you will have to do these weeks either starting the 4th of May, or, if not then, repay them at some later stage (maybe August)”.
“Please don’t worry about this for now, however”, Smith wrote, adding that “we have some weeks in the interim to review the evolving situation”.
Details of assessments for nursing and midwifery students aren’t yet confirmed, Smith said. She wrote that “the changes are kept as minimal as possible, while also incorporating degrees of flexibility as possible”.
