£2.1 million heath worker training boost for Northern Ireland’s crumbling NHS

The package includes 1,335 nursing and midwifery university places for 2022/23 – up by 10 places on the previous figure.

There will be five additional oncology places, an extra paediatric cardiology place, and one more each in transplant surgery, palliative medicine and dermatology, among other roles.

There will also be an additional 41 “allied health professional” training posts this year (these are specialist skill posts, covering everything from art and music therapists to radiographers, physios, and paramedics).

In addition, a further 44 nurses will be recruited under the International Nurse Recruitment Programme.

In a statement Mr Swann said: “I am very pleased to make this announcement and to be able to confirm, on International Nurses Day, the 1,335 total for pre-registration nursing and midwifery training places – the highest annual number we have ever commissioned.

“Nursing and midwifery university places were maintained at a record high total of 1,325 in the past two years.

“This year, despite ongoing budgetary pressures and uncertainty, we are able to maintain that figure and indeed increase it by another 10.

“To put this into context, the total in 2015/16 was 710, which means it has increased by 88% since then.”

Ruth Sedgwick, NI chief of the Office of the Royal college of Speech and Language Therapists hailed the 41 new allied spaces, saying this “starts to address, in some way, the huge gaps we have in our AHP workforce across Northern Ireland”.

She added: “Throughout the health crisis, allied health professionals like speech and language therapists have played a central role working tirelessly both on Covid wards and in the community to support those with the virus, and help them recover and rehabilitate.

“As we have returned to the delivery of services post-pandemic, there is an influx of patients requiring allied health treatments post-pandemic, Covid and non Covid related.”

However the new training places come as the Province’s health system continues to crumble.

Waiting lists have been spiralling year after year, and at the end of March fresh Department of Health figures showed that Northern Ireland’s cancer waiting times had sunk to a new low with only 43% of patients starting their treatment within two months.

In February this year it was revealed that during December 2021, roughly 7,500 patients (about 13% of the total for the month) had been left to wait for over 12 hours in an emergency ward.

The government’s objective for having patients either treated and admitted or discharged home is that nobody should ever have to wait longer than 12 hours for these things to happen.