Posted 13 June 2023 - 14:42
Posted 13 June 2023 - 14:42
News
Lost nursing student places saved by outside funding
Dublin pledges backing for 200 Northern Ireland university places in deal that could allow nurses to work on both sides of the border
Dublin pledges backing for 200 Northern Ireland university places in deal that could allow nurses to work on both sides of the border
The Irish government will fund nursing student places at Northern Ireland universities after Stormont slashed hundreds of places amid budget cuts last month.
The €10 million (about £860,000) arrangement will include 200 university places for students from the Republic of Ireland, with a proportion of the funded places also going to students from Northern Ireland, the governments have confirmed.
It comes after the Northern Ireland Department of Health (DoH) announced in May that it was cutting 300 nursing student university places for 2023-24 due to a lack of funding.
Partnership is a sign of what can be achieved through all-island cooperation, says Dublin
In a statement about the new partnership, the republic’s Department of Health in Dublin said: ‘This will support Northern Ireland’s objective of preserving their training capacity and is a sign of what can be achieved through all-island cooperation.’
The Northern Ireland Department of Health said the one-year deal would ‘help maintain the current training infrastructure for pre-registration nurse training’.
It confirmed students from the republic would be able to work on either side of the border after they graduate and said it intends to increase places provided by Northern Ireland in the future if additional funding becomes available.
A spokesperson said the Northern Ireland health service would also benefit from the fact that students with republic-funded nursing and midwifery training places in the North’s universities would do practical training there, ‘making a vital contribution to care for patients’.
Nurses in limbo as Northern Ireland grapples with a political and financial crisis
Some 50 university places have reportedly been allocated for students students from Northern Ireland as part of the deal, according to the Irish Times.
Nurses staged a demonstration outside Stormont parliament in Belfast in May over the ‘decimated’ health service in the country following cuts to nursing student places.
At the time, RCN Northern Ireland director Rita Devlin said the current state of the health service was the worst she had seen in her career. The country has been grappling with a political and financial crisis for some time, and nurses have been left in limbo after the latest pay talks with the health department failed to reach a resolution.
According to the RCN there are some 3,000 unfilled nursing posts in the Northern Ireland health service and a similar number in the independent sector.
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