Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I, too, thank Dr. Kinsella. I echo what Deputy Kelly said about the study - it is very interesting and very timely. Dr. Kinsella referred to planning cycles. Clearly we have been locked into something of an election cycle with regard to our health planning for a very long time. Would he have a suggestion as to what the ideal cycle is in terms of workforce planning? Clearly 50 years is too much and one year is too little.

I would be interested to know whether any of the 25% increase in non-pay expenditure from 2008 that Dr. Kinsella referred to was spent on purchasing man hours or whether it is all capital expenditure. My sense is that some of that is agency staff and some of that actually refers to what I would call privatisation by stealth, although I am sure other people have different terms for it.

With regard to the IT systems we have at the moment, I am aware that the nursing and midwifery planning and development units, NMPDUs, were disbanded because the people working in them were needed back on the front lines - they were put back on their tools. We have a great deal of workforce planning that we need to make up and in this regard we have a huge deficit.

In terms of the number of qualified people, if we were to snap our fingers in the morning and say that we will put in place a workforce planning team to do this, how close would we be to being able to get that personnel together? What would be required in terms of IT? As was said earlier, one only gets out what one puts in when it comes to data. I would not be convinced that we have the IT infrastructure that would be able to support it but I would be interested to hear whether Dr. Kinsella has any views on what it would take for us to be able to do that.