Dr. Maura Pidgeon:

The process is in hand and we hope to have some of the additional staff in by the end of the month.

I have addressed the question regarding the resources. It is a self-funding organisation and, given the current circumstances with regard to the annual renewal fee, we are in discussions with the Department of Health about the ongoing funding of the organisation.

With respect to the number of students in training, that is determined at Department or Government policy level. The number of students is not determined by the regulatory body. However, the number of students has not decreased for several years and is still at 1,523.

Regarding a solution to the problems, several measures are being taken as we speak to address the criticality of the situation. One of them is the board's approved spending plan. The Department of Health has been very supportive with additional staff. We have also reviewed, and had been reviewing, our internal registration processes in regard to simplifying the process and providing greater clarity of instruction and guidance to applicants. That was in tandem with the development and restructuring of our website to have greater online capacity. That will come on stream by the end of the year. There will be a completely new website. It is not just about a fancy page. It is about the restructuring and the development of core applications to enable us to do our business online as a modern organisation.

Most importantly, as I mentioned earlier, we have listened to our colleagues in both the public and private sector in regard to the establishment of this working group. It has met and the sub-groups are working on two focused areas. One is to reduce the cycle time for overseas registration and the backlog. The second relates to the area of adaptation courses and the maximum utilisation of those courses. In addition, we are, and had been, using a call centre to deal with the volume of calls coming into the organisation and e-mail inquiries relating to registration and restoration. The Department is supportive of our expanding that facility to address customer need in terms of responding to calls.

On the other areas of work, I believe we will get the situation under manageable control.

There is an increase in demand. We are aware of a potential additional 1,500 vacancies to be filled throughout the sectors. With regard to coming here from overseas, the applicants will advise through the HSE, Nursing Homes Ireland and the Dublin academic teaching hospitals. We are putting systems in place and we have identified an internal manager to support the overseas project so we can clear the backlog and develop a robust and sustainable process to prevent further backlogs of this nature.