The Northern Ireland Minister of Health, Robin Swan, approved a Special Recognition Payment (SRP), a one off payment up to the value of £500 net, for healthcare workers in Northern Ireland to reward workers for their work throughout the Covid 19 pandemic. However, under point 7 of this act only those agency workers who have worked in a single location for more than 12 weeks will be eligible for receipt of the payment. We hold that this is a blatant act of indirect discrimination against agency workers as, the nature of our work causes us to work across many different wards and locations and so only a very tiny minority of agency workers will be entitled to this payment.

Throughout this pandemic, agency workers have been expected to work daily at the heart of the pandemic, to sacrifice our health, risk our lives, put ourselves under huge stresses, comfort the dying and grieving while we were experiencing emotional traumas that many professionals have suggested will amount to PTSD, watch patients and colleagues fall and die around us in large numbers every shift, sacrifice seeing our loved ones, put our loved ones at risk, cause our loved ones extra stresses as they feared for our lives and actually carry the NHS, which after years of neglect by politicians has become dependent upon agency workers to meet its requirements.

We don't do the jobs we do for money, we do it for the love and empathy we have for humanity and a commitment to alleviating suffering wherever we find it. If it was only about money, we'd have given up years ago but this is a very deliberate and heartless snub. It is a huge insult to be told by the politicians that our hsrd work and sacrifice for the greater good of this country means absolutely nothing!

Given that agency workers have and continue to work across every location, no other group has been more exposed to covid 19 in the workplace or put under the same pressures. We call upon the Health Minister to address this issue ASAP and to cease unfair exclusion to this money which agency workers have more than earned.