The Workers’ Party expresses its strong support for the campaign of student nurses and midwives to win equality of treatment from the HSE for final year students who perform the same work as qualified staff as part of their final year “internship” programme.
Final year student nurses and midwives are required, as part of their studies, to undertake a full time “internship” of 36 weeks before graduation, working alongside qualified staff on hospital wards. However, while performing the same work as their more senior colleagues, the students are expected to work for less than minimum wage.
Cllr. Éilis Ryan
Speaking in support of the campaign group Equality for Nursing & Midwifery Interns, Workers’ Party Dublin City Councillor Éilis Ryan stated:
“It appears that the much underfunded public health system has now come to rely on the exploitation of student nurses and midwives in order to operate. The model of internships, expecting young people to work fulltime hours for less than a fulltime wage, has become prevalent through the economy in recent years, not only in the public hospital system.”
“It is a disgrace that the work of healthcare, the work of providing basic human rights to our population, has also sunk to this level of exploiting these most caring of workers. The blame for this situation rests with successive right-wing governments, who pretend to invest in the healthcare system while at the same time they run it down by continously undermining the terms and conditions of frontline staff.”
“The increased workload of frontline staff, in terms of nurse to patient ratios, combined with reductions in pay and conditions as part of so-called public sector reform, the Croke Park Agreement, have resulted in a public health system which has become starved of nursing staff, almost to the point of collapse.”
“It might shock people to know that many student nurses, upon graduation, find it far more attractive to emigrate to work in the British NHS, where the working conditions and rates of pay are far more attractive for frontline staff. In effect we are educating a generation of highly qualified and motivated healthcare professionals to emigrate and to serve the needs of societies other than our own, leaving behind a crippled public hospital system.”
“It is a system which is being systematically run down in order to force people into a private healthcare model, with mandatory private health insurance on the cards for everyone in the near future, and private for-profit hospitals filling the gaps left in the public system.”
The Workers’ Party is committed to the public provision of healthcare, free at the point of delivery for all regardless of ability to pay, and as such supports both student and qualified healthcare workers in their efforts to protect the public healthcare system through the negotiation of fair and equal treatment of all workers within that system.
The exploitation of students through so called “internships” is an unacceptable practice and should be ended immediately. The Workers’ Party calls on the government to accept the demands of the student nurses and midwives and to reverse the cost-cutting of the Croke Park agreement in relation to the rates of pay for student and newly qualified nurses and midwives.