In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic overturned life as we then knew it. Universities moved online overnight, restaurants and bars shut down, and we began to adjust to living life through our screens.

Meanwhile, our health and social care services were gearing up for an unexpected war. As a social work student in a local hospital at the time, I experienced first-hand the anxiety, uncertainty and turmoil that was widespread throughout our services. Offices were being converted into ICU wards, theatres were being fitted with ventilators, and the call was going out for staff to leave retirement, return from career-breaks, and help our services at this time of need.

The call for help also reached our students; medicine, nursing, midwifery, and social work students were asked to step up, miss out on the last three months of their degrees, and go work where they were needed. Our students answered. Over 700 students across Queen’s graduated from their degrees early to join the workforce, and many of these students took up work in frontline services.

Throughout that first lockdown we witnessed society going to great lengths to demonstrate thanks and gratitude for our NHS heroes – painted rainbows adorned living room windows, free coffees for staff available at every drive-thru, and people stood outside their homes in their millions to Clap for Carers. At Queen’s, our early graduates were collectively awarded the Student of the Year accolade and celebrated in the news and media for their contribution to society.

The World Health Organisation announced that 2020 was to be the Year of the Nurse and the Midwife, to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Florence Nightingale’s birth. Florence Nightingale, who is often referred to as the Mother of Modern Nursing, famously said in the 1870s that it would take at least 150 years for the world to see the type of nursing she envisioned – nursing that was evidence-based, steeped in leadership and compassion. Nightingale’s aspired form of nursing came to be in many ways – our nurses are educated at universities and they are highly-skilled leaders and managers in their work. But I’m not sure even Nightingale could have foreseen that in 2020, nurses across the world would be needed more than ever before.

Nursing is a vocation by its very nature, and those who choose to study nursing and midwifery are kind, compassionate, caring people, who want to make a positive impact of the lives of those they care for. They’re not in it for the money or praise, but for the satisfaction you can get from caring for a patient.

Our student nurses in Northern Ireland undertake a minimum of 2,300 hours clinical placements throughout their degree. Even pre-pandemic, nursing students had few rights while on placement, with no entitlement to sick leave or holidays. Students worked up to 40 hours a week on placement for no money other than the bursary that they are told they are lucky to receive.

Student nurses have a supernumerary status while on placement, which means that they are not counted in the staff to patient ratios needed on the wards. However, anyone who works in healthcare could tell you that the NHS has been underfunded for years – services are short-staffed and under-resourced, which means that more often than not, student nurses on placement end up picking up the slack, working through their limited breaks and doing overtime to make sure patients are cared for. The supposed “supernumerary status” held by students is sacrificed to fill gaps in services, and yet our students get no additional money for this.

Now, as COVID-19 continues to ravage our communities, our nursing students continue to undertake unpaid labour in our crippling health services. Due to cross-contamination, students who usually worked part-time as healthcare assistants to pay the bills, can no longer do so. Students are risking their lives and those of their families every single day to help on the wards, yet are in a position of having to choose between heating their homes or getting groceries. The treatment of our heroic students, the future of the NHS, is nothing short of a national disgrace.

I don’t think it’s radical to believe our nursing and midwifery students should have enough money to live while they’re studying.

Student nurses have a sense of duty beyond what I’ve witnessed anywhere else. Time and time again throughout this pandemic, student nurses have been called to stand up, and every single time they have answered that call. They are the unsung heroes of this pandemic, and for that, they deserve fair pay. It’s time for the Department of Health to step up, as our students have, and better fund our students.

We’re asking the NI Executive to #SupportStudentHealthHeroes – increase student bursaries, introduce student hazard pay, and respect our student heroes.

OPINION - Nursing Students Are Heroes. It’s Time The Executive Acts Like It