Student nurse saw toe of patient fall off, Dáil told during debate on wages

A STUDENT nurse witnessed a patient’s toe coming off in his sock, the Dáil has been told.

“A student nurse told me recently that when helping a patient to shower, the patient’s toe came off in his sock,” Kildare South Sinn Féin TD Patricia Ryan said during a debate on the new allowance of €100 a week for the trainees.

“The student nurse was on her own and could not leave the patient alone – imagine, she doesn’t get paid for that,” she said.

Ms Ryan said she had heard of other student nurses who had been thrown straight into the task of laying out the dead.

Opening a party motion on the issue, Sinn Féin spokesman on health David Cullinane meanwhile contrasted the new €100 allowance with the decision taken to increase the salary of the new secretary general of the Department of Health, Robert Watt.

A pay rise of €81,000 for Mr Watt – to an annual salary of almost €300,000 – says everything about the Government’s claim to value student nurses, he said

The new €100 allowance for first, second and third-year student nurses and midwives, on the other hand, was being seen quite rightly as “a slap in the face”, Mr Cullinane said.

“You hatched out a plan in your department for a pay rise of €81,000 to bring that salary close to €300,000 a year,” he said. “How can you say that is fair and reasonable, and that is you as a minister valuing the work on the front line and the work that student nurses and midwives do.”

He said the minister was prioritising a single individual over those who had done trojan work since the pandemic struck. He cited letters from student nurses who had contracted Covid-19, one of whom said: “It is not worth working as a nurse in this country”.

Sinn Féin TD Matt Carthy said the €100 allowance was “insulting and patronising and sums up this Government”. Robert Watt’s pay increase of €81,000 was far more than the annual salaries of individual nurses, and would now reach €292,000, he said.

He called on every TD to “stand by those who have stood by us”.

Sinn Féin TD Sean Crowe said student nurses had always been seen as a source for free or cheap labour. The Government did not live on the same planet as the rest of us if it could give such a pay rise to someone already earning more than €200,000 in the health sector.

Mr Cullinane said he had raised the issue of pay for student nurses and midwives in July, September, October and November of last year, before the Government had voted down another party’s motion on the subject before Christmas.

Health Minister Stephen Donnelly paid tribute to the dedication of all health professionals as they continued to grapple with the pandemic. He said he hoped the €100 a week allowance, recommended in a report by expert Tom Collins, would be backdated to the start of the academic year, last September.