A special recognition payment of £500 (€565) has been announced for Northern Ireland’s health staff.
Stormont's Health Minister Robin Swann said it will be paid to all health and social care workers including doctors, nurses, care home workers, domiciliary care workers, administrative staff and estates teams.
The payment is subject to approval by the North's Department of Finance.
BREAKING: Health Minister announces plans for £500 special recognition payment for health and social care staff pic.twitter.com/pDUVNpWZBB
— Department of Health (@healthdpt) January 27, 2021
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Mr Swann also announced a one-off recognition payment of £2,000 for students who have been on clinical placement between October 1st, 2020 and March 31st, 2021.
The qualifying courses include nursing and midwifery, social work and physician associate pre-registration programmes commissioned from Queen’s University Belfast and the Ulster University by Stormont’s health department.
Mr Swann said that thanking the health workers for their work through the pandemic was not enough.
“There are no words to properly convey what they have done for us – we will never be able to repay that debt,” he said.
The minister added that he recognised the payment may pose challenges for some of the lower-paid workers, in terms of potentially having an adverse impact on their social security payments.
“So this afternoon I have written to the ministers of finance and communities asking them to urgently consider the issue and to engage with the tax and benefit authorities in GB to request that these payments are excluded from consideration in this regard,” he said.
“And whilst the UK nations are still negotiating a new pay deal for NHS Agenda for Change staff this payment will have no bearing on that.”
A one-off award is also set to be made to carers but Mr Swann said more work is to be done on this before further detail can be announced.
Vaccines
Meanwhile, Dr Patricia Donnelly, the head of Northern Ireland’s Covid-19 vaccination programme, announced an acceleration of the rollout.
The region received a further delivery of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine on Tuesday, and another delivery is expected next week.
Dr Donnelly said those will cover the 75-plus age group and start provision to the over-70 population.
She said Thursday will see the start of a “twin-track approach”, as the seven regional vaccination centres start receiving members of the public.
GPs will focus on the 70-and-over age group, while the vaccination centres will offer appointments to 65-to-69-year-olds.
So far, 191,050 doses of Covid vaccinations have been administered.
This includes 168,140 first doses and 22,910 second doses.
Earlier First Minister Arlene Foster said she would rather see people vaccinated than doses potentially wasted.
Ms Foster was speaking following reports of a leaked email which appeared to offer some staff in the South Eastern Health Trust the opportunity to register family members for early access to the jab.
The email indicated that over-65s, known to staff, could book in at its vaccine centre before the official announcement.
The trust said it started a local trawl in advance of the online public booking system going live to fill slots and ensure they would not “lose hundreds of precious vaccine slots”.
Mrs Foster said: “The vaccination centres are using the Pfizer vaccine, and it is very restrictive in how and when it can be used. It has to be kept at very cold temperatures and then used quite quickly.
“As I understand it from looking into this, this is to deal with the very first appointment because we do not want to risk losing this vaccine.
“We are very proud of the fact that our wastage in terms of vaccination is about 0.4 per cent, I think that is very, very good and I’d much rather see people vaccinated than waste the vaccine.”
The First Minister told the BBC: “I think wasting the vaccine would be absolutely the wrong message to send to people.”
The Stormont Executive is set to meet on Thursday with Education Minister Peter Weir expected to bring a paper around school closures.
Schools in the North have been closed since stopping for the Christmas break due to a fresh raft of lockdown restrictions to curb the spread of the virus.
It was announced on Wednesday that a further 16 people have died after testing positive for Covid-19, bringing the toll in Northern Ireland to 1,779.
The Department of Health also confirmed another 527 positive cases of the virus.
There are now 775 patients with Covid-19 in hospital, including 68 in intensive care.
