Why not pay the student nurses?!

Smacruairi

Geuze wrote: »

They are students, not employees, so there is no wage involved.

They are not on the payroll of the DES.

A PME student is a student, not an employee.

If in doubt, bring teachers into it. Lol.

ted1

Padre_Pio wrote: »

Another b*llocks statement.

Ireland is competing with every other western country for healthcare workers. If some other country has better wages and conditions for any profession then how can you blame people for going for it?

The HSE is a disgrace. Between the abysmal pay, understaffing, long hours, stress and weekly scandals, I'm not surprised HCPs are leaving the country.
If Ireland stopped nurses and doctors emigrating we'd have no Irish doctors and nurses. Who would go to college and graduate only to be shackled to this country for five years?

Madness.

EDIT The HSE ran a campaign to bring home Irish nurses from abroad. Promised them decent money and relocation bonuses. It was a complete failure as most nurses abroad know they have it better than they would get in Ireland.

The HSE also scrambled to pull student nurses out of college in March and gave them the same responsibilities as staff nurses, and didn't even pay them.

For many people working abroad money is secondary. Most do it for a change to live in the sun etc

Geuze

Jim Gazebo wrote: »

It does not mean that they cannot be paid. Training in a work setting is still working whatever way you want to look at it.

Grand, ok, which tax should rise to pay for this?

Suckit

ted1 wrote: »

They should have received the PUP payment for their paying job

Isn't that pretty much similar to what they are asking for now?

Strumms wrote: »

Let’s do a private company comparison.

Me and you Padre, we set up an airline,, we spend a lot of money, hiring, providing type rated training, for pilots and on other sundries such as uniforms etc...about 10,000 a head.. after a couple of months John or Marie gets a better offer at British Airways, fûcks off there with the type rating and all that money is goodbye... happening all too often.. so the industry to protect their investment... tens of thousands of euros... ‘bond’ the new hires in their contracts...

the purpose of the bond is for the employer to protect their investment. In this case, the Irish state and taxpayers being protected...The normal process is that the employer will ‘pay’ for the employee’s training. The employee will be bonded for a period of 2 – 3 years to work here FOR and IN the HSE..with their liability for the amount reducing over that time. At the expiration of that period, the employee has no further financial liability. But if you want to leave after two years, you are legally responsible for repaying one third of your training costs. You are buying out the remainder of that bond... medical training is seriously expensive, paid for by taxpayers exclusively. Taxpayers need a return on that investment...

Again, not comparable and the student nurses are not looking for payment 'from now on' - Just purely for what they have earned this year and helped so that those private companies can continue to earn more money next year.

It was not by any means 'a normal year'.

purifol0

Yes, I advocate a similar arrangement but IMO taxpayers are easily manipulated simpletons who are behind the "good" striking nurses (who walked off cancer wards!) and behind the evil Min of Health du jour.

The health service is in such a state that nearly every second Irish adult has purchased private health care!

The INMO propaganda machine never went away.

I reckon the only way the private sector taxpayers would ever be swayed on this topic is if we could actually see how much every public sector worker was taking home. Sounds mad, yes they do it in Norway but that's for every worker. IMO the taxpaying public have a right to easily know how much a public sector nurse/garda/whatever is actually getting, and see what happens if they strike for low pay when the payslips are obfuscated by lies and payscales without overtime and a myriad of additional payments.

ted1

uptherebels wrote: »

When I did my engineering placement, companies were not allowed to offer places to students if they were unpaid positions. And guess what happened......the 80+ in my year all had paid placements

I’m an engineer too. The pay was voluntary for placements and not compulsory, nurses get expenses, accommodation allowances which match up to what many engineers get.

Padre_Pio

Strumms wrote: »

Let’s do a private company comparison.

Let's not. Because it's irrelevant. Sorry you wasted your time writing that post.

The HSE doesn't pay for nurses training. Universities do, and they're funded by the state to provide "free" education, same as any other university course.

ted1 wrote: »

I’m an engineer too. The pay was voluntary for placements and not compulsory, nurses get expenses, accommodation allowances which match up to what many engineers get.

I don't think that's true.
Can a student nurse even get all the allowances? Usually they're for things an employer would usually pay for anyways, like uniforms.
.

purifol0

Smacruairi wrote: »

You know the reason we have pay deals is to keep costs lower, otherwise you have hospitals out bidding each other for staff which are scarce which is then passed on to you the insurance payer or tax payer?

Where did you hear this sterling piece of fiction?
Payscales are just a handy way of extracting more and more money out of the taxpayers without ever having to worry about asking for a raise or justifying getting one. Oh and are there any private hospitals giving nurses Defined benefit pensions?

Smacruairi

You don't like civil servants, got you, continue on your salty rant.

purifol0

Smacruairi wrote: »

You don't like civil servants, got you, continue on your salty rant.

Ah the ones I work with are OK. Haven't met them much since I started working for the CS in March though for obvious reasons.



I immediately applied for public sector positions in Feb because I remembered exactly what happened the last time a recession hit - private sector got dole, public sector protected at huge cost. History repeats. In a year where we returned to a recession and 200K private sector workers are unemployed the entire public sector were given a raise. Me too! For doing nothing at all. Amazing



My previous employer Construction company was ordered shut and not long after, it went under.

Jim Gazebo

Geuze wrote: »

Grand, ok, which tax should rise to pay for this?

Funny where has all the money we've spent since covid arrived come from? They take enough in taxes already, the money should be there.

Only a certain cohort are paid by the state as well. Would you be happy working / training as a nurse for nothing?

quokula

Suckit wrote: »

But that is part of the problem. Unattractive salaries here etc, with the cost of living. It's not like they are sponging either, they are physically working.
Plenty of other professionals leave the country to get a better salary.

The debate is currently not to pay the student nurses forever, it is to pay the nurses that have worked their backends off during the pandemic, and I'm also willing to bet that the majority of the public would be in favour of them getting paid, and probably against the amount of 'small incremental' pay rises the government have awarded themselves this year.

Daft decision and timing to declare they wouldn't be getting paid.

The vote was on much more than that though.

— immediately reinstate the payment of student nurses and midwives who are in placements during the Covid-19 pandemic at the HCA rate;
— urgently engage with student nurses and midwives and their union representatives to establish a bursary or payment system that will fully acknowledge the work they do in our health service and will cover the costs of travel and accommodation for the length of their placements;
— abolish all fees for students who are training to work on the frontline of the health service in order to stem the ‘brain drain’, and allow the Health Service Executive to recruit a sufficient number of staff to run our health service at safe and adequately staffed levels; and
— ensure parity of pay, conditions and esteem for nurses and midwives with all other paramedical graduates, including the 37-hour week.”

There was a whole lot more in there than just paying for placements during covid. The government were never going to vote that through, but of course that was never the intention as it was a typical PBP publicity stunt to get headlines without anyone looking at the detail.

Students who were on placement during the peak of the pandemic in exceptional circumstances were paid. Currently there are about 200 people in hospital with covid in the country and hospitals are running normally with more full time nurses hired so I'd be surprised if any nurses on placement are having any contact with covid patients at all. And 4th year nurses on internships do continue to be paid as they always have been. And once qualified they get much higher salaries than nurses in our neighbouring countries.

The best thing the government could do for nurses in relation to the pandemic is to suppress it with social distancing measures and ensure they're never made to work under extreme conditions, something which Ireland has actually done better than pretty much any other country in Europe. But that has all come at a cost so the government does have to try and save money where it can too as there will be an inevitable recession out of all of this and every pay rise and every person who gets paid extra to be educated will have to be paid for from somewhere else.

Padre_Pio

purifol0 wrote: »

Ah the ones I work with are OK. Haven't met them much since I started working for the CS in March though for obvious reasons.

Whenever you see things about public sector workers getting raises ask yourself this question: How much of my tax money goes toward this raise? The answer is probably only a few pennies.

Now ask yourself: How much will I save in tax if they don't get a raise? The answer is nothing.

The government has no problem wasting billions of tax money yearly. I will always support my money going to pay some nurse or teacher or garda in the hopes it won't be spent on some nonsense like knocking a hole in the wall of Dail Eireann so they can push a massive printer in.

Btw as of last month that printer still hasn't printed a single page.

0ph0rce0

Come January I bet you TD's will get some sort of payrise :pac:

Tig98

I know a student nurse who was griping about only being paid the HCA rate. I think its fair, as they are not a nurse, they are a student nurse. They're not qualified. Third year nurses go out on placement when they have the bones of three full semesters to complete (if they do) before they graduate. Its unfair to qualified nurses if the students are on the same rate, and the HCAs since they have the same qualification.

Wanderer78

Tig98 wrote:

I know a student nurse who was griping about only being paid the HCA rate. I think its fair, as they are not a nurse, they are a student nurse. They're not qualified. Third year nurses go out on placement when they have the bones of three full semesters to complete (if they do) before they graduate. Its unfair to qualified nurses if the students are on the same rate, and the HCAs since they have the same qualification.

Again, funnily enough, higher pay, means more money circulating in the economy

khalessi

Traditionally student nurses were paid when they trained in hospitals as they were working 40 hour weeks and doing night duty. This changed when the training became university based. They should be paid for their year on the wards.

Medicine has been hospital based for years but the last year or first year on the was as an intern has always been paid.

It should be the same for student nurses.

They should also have been paid for working on the wards during the pandemic, as they were doing 30 hour weeks.

Darc19

mickdw wrote: »

The fact the the nurses were this year placed into unforeseen covid situation, doing front line work and then being banned from taking on other work due to the nature of the unpaid work, i feel its criminal not to pay them.

This is where SF, pbp, etc want to muddle the water and not give you correct information so that those who believe their bs without checking facts will get agitated.

Back in April, may and June the nursing students were effectively contracted into jobs by the government.

They WERE paid.


This arrangement ended and they returned to their normal college coursework which in many cases will have work experience which requires some supervision by experienced nurses.


The work experience they are doing now, may involve dealing with covid patients as that's the current issue in hospitals, but it's supervised training work that is a normal part of their course.


This is simply emotional blackmail by SF and pbp.

a very cool kid

I think the idea is that student nurses are not supposed to be actually working when on clinical placement (they're supposed to be " in college" at the hospital).



In March with the emergency, it was anticipated there wouldn't be space on hospitals for clinical placements. So to add cover for the anticipated surge they were given healthcare provider contracts (and paid accordingly). The major crisis is over now so they're back to being students. Any of them who lost their part time job off the back of being in hospital are entitled to PUP.



Whether you agree with compensation for student nurses is one thing but I think it's been incredibly disingenuous to frame this as though the students are losing money in this case. They all started the course knowing they weren't going to be paid. They were asked to go above their normal tasks outside the course (fair play to them for doing it) and were paid for it. Anyone out of pocket as a result of being linked to the hospital gets the PUP.



What happened last night in the Dáil was a publicity stunt to stir outrage. The pay student nurses 14 euro an hour motion would cost 60 -100 million euro a year (by my own back of an envelope calculations). There was no good answer the government could give. It could be argued this was a money grab framed as an injustice.



Nurses do an important job in our society and are pretty well renumerated for it (not quite Canada/Australia levels but certainly at or above the European average).



We closed the country down to prevent hospitals being overrun and they weren't overrun (in fact the opposite of anything) - in the cold light of day were hospital workers really that stretched?

suicide_circus

In terms of cost, we are already so deep in the sh1t in terms of national debt after successive lockdowns that paying these student nurses would be a drop in the ocean.

On the hand we spend more on healthcare every year and healthcare gets successively worse every year - any pay increases to healthcare workers needs to be tied to reforms and efficiencies - throwing money at the HSE and it's employees does not seem to work.

Furthermore, when you consider what i can only imagine is vast amounts of fraudulent PUP claims given the way it was rolled out, seems a bit mean to deny it to people who were actually working.

lawrencesummers

The people who don’t think student nurses shouldn’t be paid during the pandemic have not got one idea what they are doing.


At the very least they should be put on the PuP as they can’t actually work in paid employment. Their bum unemployed friends are at home doing nothing and getting it while student nurses are working for free in the environment most likely to give you Covid.


I wonder will our politicians be docking their own wages because of their paltry attendance in the Dail since this began?


This is a disgusting move by FFG and it’s only a political one so that the PBP don’t win a dail vote.

listermint

ted1 wrote: »

I’m an engineer too. The pay was voluntary for placements and not compulsory, nurses get expenses, accommodation allowances which match up to what many engineers get.

I'd suggest your experience is decades old.


Similarly to the utter bollixology spouted in this thread.

'sure I did it why shouldn't they' Its along the veign of how kids used to work in the mines or in factory's churning out clothes. Just because it was the way a decade ago two decades ago or 80 years ago doesn't mean it's ok today.

People doing actual work should get actual pay. I'd suggest if you did your engineering degree today and placement you'd get paid a decent enough wage. And that's how it should be.


I've no idea why people cling on to these ****e capitalist notions of not bettering our society at all.

a very cool kid

suicide_circus wrote: »

In terms of cost, we are already so deep in the sh1t in terms of national debt after successive lockdowns that paying these student nurses would be a drop in the ocean.

On the hand we spend more on healthcare every year and healthcare gets successively worse every year - any pay increases to healthcare workers needs to be tied to reforms and efficiencies - throwing money at the HSE and it's employees does not seem to work.

Furthermore, when you consider what i can only imagine is vast amounts of fraudulent PUP claims given the way it was rolled out, seems a bit mean to deny it to people who were actually working.

We spend way too much on healthcare already, increasing the health budget just means more strikes and more inflation.

You can't justify the addition of 4000 extra salaries to the public wage bill every year for eternity off the back of a load one off borrowed money. Those who lost part time work are entitled to PUP. No one is out of pocket here

lawrencesummers

Jesus Christ these people are working and not even getting enough money for room and board.

Do you expect student nurses to starve living under bridges just so they can work for nothing.

a very cool kid

lawrencesummers wrote: »

The people who don’t think student nurses shouldn’t be paid during the pandemic have not got one idea what they are doing.


At the very least they should be put on the PuP as they can’t actually work in paid employment. Their bum unemployed friends are at home doing nothing and getting it while student nurses are working for free in the environment most likely to give you Covid.


I wonder will our politicians be docking their own wages because of their paltry attendance in the Dail since this began?


This is a disgusting move by FFG and it’s only a political one so that the PBP don’t win a dail vote.

If training in a hospital during the pandemic means they're after losing a part time position they are entitled to.PUP.

suicide_circus

Fair enough.

It is of course very easy fo the government opposition to vote to spend more money when they dont have responsibility for balancing the books.

lawred2

ted1 wrote: »

They are not qualified doing placements same as other college students who do placements

It could also prove to be very costly to the state. And also have issue with pensions etc. If you start counting the college years can nurses retire several years earlier.

It’s easy to shout widen the sideline when you don’t have to balance the books

When people start nursing they know what the course entails. To complain after you accepted the conditions is wrong.

We got paid on placement...

Not much but it was still something..

a very cool kid

lawrencesummers wrote: »

Jesus Christ these people are working and not even getting enough money for room and board.

Do you expect student nurses to starve living under bridges just so they can work for nothing.

They're universally students based in a hospital. When they were needed to work (as opposed to train) they were paid.

khalessi

There is a history of paying student nurses, I dont see what the issue is. They do a days work, they deserve to be paid a decent wage.

a very cool kid

suicide_circus wrote: »

Fair enough.

It is of course very easy fo the government opposition to vote to spend more money when they dont have responsibility for balancing the books.

The whole motion was a publicity stunt to throw **** at the (admittedly imperfect) big bad capitalist government. Like I said no one is out of pocket here - when the nursing students were asked to pitch in (which they did and very well) they were paid for it.