SDLP MLA Mark H Durkan has criticised the Department of Health for speaking from both sides of its mouth following news that 300 nursing student places are to be cut while recommitting to the delivery of 1,025 new nursing places.
Mr Durkan said decades of destructive decisions like this one has resulted in the slow-motion collapse of the health system in North of Ireland.
Said the Foyle MLA: “There are currently 2,714 nursing vacancies in Health and Social Care with a similar rate across the independent and nursing home sector.
“The service is haemorrhaging nursing staff with some employees retiring and others opting to take better paid opportunities elsewhere due to the paltry pay on offer in Northern Ireland.
“We can’t forget that nursing unions took to the picket lines twice in the past few years, to demand safe staffing levels. The decision to cut 300 student places will service to add further pressures to a battle-weary workforce and compromise patient safety.
“This isn’t merely a difficult budgetary decision, by eliminating hundreds of nursing places, the department are cutting off the oxygen supply to a health service in crisis.”
Mr Durkan added: “The DUP’s egotistical, flagrant disregard for people has a part to play in this madness however this situation is a direct consequence of the £300 million overspend and years of financial mismanagement by the parties who have held the purse strings, the DUP and Sinn Féin.
“Failure to get a grip on agency spend is an element of that overspend.
“The band-aid approach of employing temporary private healthcare staff to plug gaps in services has amounted to a £320 million bill for 2021/22 – that means agency spend has increased almost five times what it was ten years ago.
“It’s now a case of not being able to put the genie back in the bottle.
“This isn’t just a question of money, it’s the loss of opportunities, job creation and the critical transformation of our health system.
£The solutions to this crisis were given by expert panels long ago; failure to implement those solutions has left the health service on its knees.
“In cutting student places, the department’s penny-wise and pound-foolish approach will have long term and devastating repercussions for the future of the health service.”
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