More than 10,000 new nurses and midwives in Victoria will have the remaining balances on their university credit cards paid off in full as part of an initiative to fix the state’s understaffed health care system.
As part of a plan presented by the Victorian government on Sunday and costs a total of $270 million, the state will be recruiting and training thousands of nurses and midwives at no cost.
All first-year domestic students who enrol in a professional-entry nursing and midwifery programme will be eligible for a scholarship in the amount of $16,500 to pay their educational costs in the academic years 2023 and 2024.
They will get an additional $9,000 throughout the course of their three-year degree if they work in the Victorian public health sector for a total of two years following graduation.
The outstanding balance of $7,500 will be settled.
Premier Daniel Andrews made this promise to the media while he was at the office of the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation (ANMF) in Melbourne. “We will cover their whole HECS debt,” he said.
Andrews stated that the state government had been working on a solution for months, even while hospitals across the state were beginning to buckle under the strain of the most recent COVID-19 wave.
According to what he had remarked, “Our hospital system is under very, very tremendous pressure,” and he attributed this to a number of other issues.