Lithuania will offer free tuition to hundreds of young people training to become nurses, in a bid to shore up its ailing health workforce.
Under the new scheme, 10 colleges and universities will admit 535 people to state-funded nursing programmes for the 2025-2026 school year, according to Lithuania’s health ministry.
That’s 100 more state-funded students than last year, it added.
Around the same number of students will be offered unfunded spots, meaning they will have to pay for their nursing education – unless they agree to work in certain medical centres for two years after they graduate, in which case the institutions will cover their tuition.
The programme is expected to save self-funded students €10,500 to €16,400 each.
“We would like to invite school graduates and other young people … to connect their future with a noble mission that is extremely necessary for the state – the nursing profession,” Laimutė Vaidelienė, Lithuania’s vice minister of health, said in a statement.
Once they graduate, students will be encouraged to return to their hometowns for their two-year placements. They can pursue any field they like – whether that’s general practice, emergency care, psychiatry, paediatrics, or something else, the health ministry said.
The European Union will provide €17 million for the programme as part of a broader effort to fix nursing shortages across the bloc, which are driven by both an ageing population that needs more healthcare services and retirements and other departures within the health workforce.
In 2022, for example, Lithuania had 27.6 nurse graduates per 100,000 people, ranking 11th among 33 European countries with data. But 51.5 per cent of its nurses were aged 55 or older, a higher rate than anywhere else.
Few nurses migrated to Lithuania from other countries, prompting the Baltic nation to look for ways to boost its nursing pipeline.
“Nursing is more than a job,” Vaidelienė said. “It is an opportunity to help, care, be needed, contribute to people's health, public welfare and the preservation of life, and to constantly grow as a person and as a specialist”.
