Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for welcoming me to Bandon the other day. We had a good day all around Cork but I was particularly happy to tell the people of Bandon that their community hospital is not only safe but will be invested in and has a bright future.

On the UN convention, I echo my comments to Senator Kelleher. This is a priority issue not only for me and the Minister of State, Deputy Finian McGrath, but for Government and, I believe, the Oireachtas. We must get this convention ratified and we will do so. As I said, there is a lot of work going on in that regard.

I am grateful for the Deputy's comments in regard to political consensus. It is important that we strive to have in place a strategic plan that can provide everybody working in the health service with a degree of certainty, which feeds into my response to the Deputy's second question. If we can tell people working in the health service or aspiring to work in it exactly where we plan to take the service and how we propose to develop it, it makes it a more appealing place to work. People do not want to work in an environment that is constantly changing according to plans and policy.

The Deputy is correct on the beds issue. We must ensure that everything we put into the winter initiative can be delivered. The Deputy will have noted from my comments in the media recently that I was not happy to sign off on the winter initiative initially. We want the metrics to be clear. We are providing €40 million of taxpayers money to the HSE to make improvements for patients and staff and we need to know what we are getting for it. Therefore, we stress tested the initiative and identified what is provided for and so on. I do not apologise for demanding that level of detail and I am pleased that we got it. The HSE has clarified that the 300 beds provided under last year's winter initiative are fore-funded to be open this winter. I expect all of them to be open this year.

The Deputy raised an issue in regard to nurses. She is correct that there is a shortage of nurses and nursing graduates not only in Ireland but across many countries. There number of nurses employed in the public health service in Ireland increased by 1,163 between August 2014 and August 2016. This means the number of nursing staff has increased from 34,375 to 35,712. That is not to suggest everything is rosy because the numbers did fall by 4,000 from 2007 to 2014. I hope that any nurse watching these proceedings will not think I am suggesting we are back to the levels we would like to be at. We have a journey to go in that regard. There are already a number of initiatives under way to try to improve nurse staffing levels throughout the country. The most important initiative is offering people a permanent job. We are not going to keep nurses in this country if they are only being offered a two or three month contract or temporary work when they know they can go across the sea to the UK or to Northern Ireland and get a permanent post. In fairness, my predecessors were not in a position to offer permanent posts for a number of years. These are now back on offer. All of our nursing graduates this year will be offered permanent jobs in the Irish health service. This sends out the important message that we are open again for business in terms of recruitment. It will take time to build up confidence. This is about the issues raised in the exchanges I had earlier with Deputy O'Connell, Senator Burke and others around career and training opportunities. We need to ensure we keep nurse training opportunities in our health service well funded. That is a priority for me.

The HSE has launched an international staff nurse recruitment campaign, the purpose of which is to attract nurses back from the UK to jobs in Ireland, with a particular emphasis on nurses who left Ireland in the past few years. These nurses are being offered relocation fees of €1,500, payment of their nursing registration costs with the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Ireland and payment of post-graduate education costs. This campaign is ongoing. Approximately 420 applications have now been received, with 83 people having accepted job offers. There are a number of other interviews scheduled to take place. This scheme remains open. There are a number of other issues, which I will not discuss in this forum, that nurses believe will make the viability of a nursing job in this country more appealing and sustainable, on which engagement continues. There is a body of work yet to be done in this area.