Anger over freeze on student nurse places in Northern Ireland
Failure to restore 300 cut student spaces for nursing and midwifery in Northern Ireland has been slammed as “short-sighted” and “incomprehensible”.
The Northern Ireland Department of Health announced on Wednesday, 8 May, that the number of funded pre-registration education places for the 2024-25 academic year would be 1,025 – the same as last year but a reduction from 1,325 in 2022-23.
“This penny-wise, pound-foolish approach to workforce planning is extremely short-sighted”
Rita Devlin
Northern Ireland health minister Robin Swann said “intensifying budgetary pressures” meant he could not announce an increase to the numbers of nursing and midwifery places.
These same budgetary pressures, Mr Swann said, meant education spaces for allied health professionals and social workers would also remain the same as last year, at 335 and 285 respectively.
“Significant progress has been made in recent years to increase our workforce and I had hoped to be announcing further increases to training places today to underpin the ongoing transformation of the HSC but, unfortunately, that is not the case,” said Mr Swann.
“I have warned that the budgetary position for health would impact heavily on key areas, including training. This is the first confirmation of that highly regrettable reality.”
A similar announcement was made a year ago, when the numbers were first cut back to 1,025 following the end of the New Decade, New Approach agreement made after Royal College of Nursing (RCN) strikes in 2019 and 2020. This deal increased numbers by 300 per year between 2020 and 2023 (totalling 900 across the three years).
Pre-registration nursing and midwifery student places increased from 1,025 in 2019-20 to 1,325 in 2020-21, 2021-22 and 2022-23, before returning to 1,025 from 2023-24 onwards.
A cross-border deal with the Republic of Ireland, made shortly after last year’s announcement, restored 250 of the cut 300 places in nursing and midwifery – on the provision that 200 of the places would be reserved for students from the republic to study across the border. However, this deal was only for 2023-24.
Mr Swann said he would continue to “strongly” advocate for more funding for health and social care, and that he was seeking cross-departmental and executive funding for more education spaces for the health workforce.
RCN Northern Ireland executive director Rita Devlin aired her frustration at the continued freeze on student places.
She said the 300 extra places per year provided between 2020 and 2023 had been “beginning to have an impact on the depleted nursing workforce”.
“Not only are we back to where we started but the consequences for patients are likely to be far-reaching,” Ms Devlin added.
“The RCN has warned for years about the dangers of cutting the number of nurses we train and the damage this will do to patient care.”
“This penny-wise, pound-foolish approach to workforce planning is extremely short-sighted.
“To continue to repeat the mistakes of the past is frankly outrageous. The outcomes of these decisions will be felt by patients and staff across every care sector.”
Ms Devlin said substandard levels of domestic recruitment and training meant Northern Ireland remained reliant on international recruitment and that this was an unsustainable way to fix the workforce gaps.
“As nurses, we understand that there are constraints on the health budget but storing up problems for the future which are expensive to fix if you are then reliant on nurses from other countries and agency staff, is incomprehensible,” Ms Devlin further said.
