THE DEPARTMENT of Health has said any change to plans to cut pay for student nurses and midwives would have to be made up by reductions in other areas of the nursing budget.
The department met nursing unions on Wednesday to begin the process of putting in place a review announced last month by Minister for Health James Reilly into the decision of the former government to cut the pay of student nurses and midwives during their mandatory placement period in hospitals.
The Fianna Fáil-Green coalition announced last December it planned to phase out payments to student nurses during their 36-week placement in hospitals and to eliminate them completely from 2015. As part of this move it reduced the pay of this year’s fourth-year students to 76 per cent of the salary of a starting nurse, down from 80 per cent of a staff nurse’s salary.
The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) said yesterday on its website that the meeting had been “quite difficult”.
It said the department had stressed “that if the undergraduate pay cut was reversed then the money would have to be found elsewhere within the nursing/midwifery arena”.
“This is, for obvious reasons, totally unacceptable and cannot form the basis of any resolution of this issue. We will be seeking early progress on the issue of the payment to this year’s undergraduates based upon the simple reality that no one can accept that two levels of salary should apply for people doing the same job within the same public health service.”
The union also said the department had sought its position with regard to the introduction of a graduate placement programme for newly qualified nurses and midwives. It said the INMO “would warmly welcome the introduction of such a programme which would guarantee two years’ work upon qualification to a new graduate nurse/midwife”.