Covid-19 Pandemic
Dail Éireann — 2020-11-11
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Micheál Martin (FF), Cork South-Central

Hold on a second and listen. The decision was taken to suspend clinical placements for all students and to offer all undergraduate nurses and midwives temporary healthcare assistant contracts. At the same time, the salary level for fourth-year internship students was raised to the healthcare assistant rate. The cost of that was about €41 million. That worked on that occasion.
The situation is much different now in terms of the impact on Covid itself. In April, there were approximately 900 patients with Covid-19 in hospitals. As of 8 November, the number was 285. Therefore, there is a different level of intensity in the hospitals regarding Covid.

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Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2020-11-11/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:48:46+00:00
Sitting date: 2020-11-11