Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Approximately €330 million was spent between 2009 and 2014 on replacing and upgrading some of these community nursing units, district hospitals and so on.

The facility I am most familiar with in my constituency is St. Mary's Hospital in the park, which has now been replaced by a fabulous community nursing unit. An additional €200 million is to be spent in the coming years upgrading or replacing some of the existing facilities. There is also a public private partnership bundle as well.

Priority will be given to those which are least HIQA compliant, if that makes any sense. HIQA will have expressed views on all of these facilities. Some are more in need of being replaced than others. The intention is to keep all of them open as much as possible until they are replaced or refurbished, for all sorts of obvious reasons.

I do not have a timeframe on any of them at the moment. Certainly a facility such as St. Patrick's Community Hospital in Carrick-on-Shannon has to be done. Again, I would rather not put a date on it because I do not want to be held to something that I cannot be sure of, but certainly it would have to be fully done, built and occupied by 2021. The question of how it will be done has not yet been determined. My best guess is that it will be done as part of a PPP. In that case a total rebuild is probably required. The existing facility probably cannot be refurbished. In other words, we would have to rebuild next to it in the way the new community nursing unit was developed beside St. Mary's Hospital in the park. Similar designs will probably be built throughout the country. They will probably be done as a bundle of community nursing units similar to the bundles of schools or primary care centres that Deputies will be familiar with. It is difficult to put an exact timeframe on it. We hope it will be done as soon as possible. However, it has to go through planning, design and so on. It is difficult to put a timeframe on these things.

Nursing recruitment is a real struggle. Everyone is recruiting at the moment, not only nursing homes but private and public hospitals as well. Everyone is looking for nurses. The HSE is 750 nurses up on this time last year. Some of this is accounted for by agency conversion but most of it is a result of new extra nurses. The Nursing and Midwifery Board of Ireland is getting better at speeding up the applications. Often there are problems with paperwork and so on. A particularly encouraging development this year is the effort being made to retain the graduating class of this year. I was in Connolly Hospital in Blanchardstown, where 16 of the 18 trainee nurses are staying. The other two are going to Cork.