"The European Commission must put pressure on Member States to ensure that each country takes on its responsibility for the training of their own healthcare workforce"

This was stated by Marian Harkin MEP in the European Parliament when making the point that while the EU Commission was calling on all Member States to educate young health practitioners, Ireland as a country was ducking its responsibility and implementing a 16.5% cut in undergraduate nursing places. She said:- “The EU Commission has made it clear in its Green Paper on the European Workforce for Health that ‘the key to maintaining a sufficient workforce is the impending retirement of the "baby boom" generation, is to educate, recruit and retrain young practitioners while investing in mature workforce’. Furthermore the Green Paper emphasises that ‘if more doctors and nurses and other staff are needed, more university places or training schools will need to be created and more teaching staff to train them. This will require both planning and investment’.

"Yet in Ireland we are cutting back significantly on our nurse training places - going totally against EU policy and placing the long term sustainability of our healthcare system at risk. We also need to consider the ethical question of recruiting nurses from abroad. This often means that there is a negative impact on the vulnerable health care systems in developing countries. Not only do we have a responsibility to our own citizens we also have it to development countries to ensure that we train sufficient nurses to service our healthcare system." Marian Harkin concluded.