Senator Andrew Green also admitted that costs might be higher to train in the field compared to other specialist areas.
The minister made the comments following a question from Deputy Sam Mézec who asked if the government would consider partially or fully funding mental-health nursing courses.
Senator Green said: ‘Because we have sufficient registered general nurse students, we can run courses on-Island.
‘Despite our focus on recruiting mental health nurses we have insufficient numbers at the current time to practically run a course in Jersey.
‘If we had more people coming forward to register and to train as mental health nurses in Jersey then we would run the course. We ran a course in the past but we only get single figures – one, two or three people coming forward at the moment and I think it is that that we need to change.’
Deputy Southern asked if the higher training costs could be the reason for Islanders not wanting to train in the field and whether he would commit to ensuring that fees to train as a mental or general health nurse would be the same.
In response, Senator Green said: ‘I am not prepared to commit to that directly but I am prepared to commit to looking at it. The problem is that registered general nurses that we train we train on-Island, they work on our wards and immediately they fully qualify, they become staff nurses on our wards.
‘If we fund courses in the UK, we may never see those students come back as registered mental health nurses in Jersey.’
He added: ‘We have a good record of training, we had 14 go into our system as qualified nurses last year, we have got a scheme coming forward to train 12 local social workers and I just want to have a look to see if there is something we could do to train mental health nurses.’
