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

I thank Ms Harkin-Kelly for her presentation. It is fairly comprehensive.

The question of the skill mix has arisen a number of times today, and there is general acceptance that we could do better. There is clearly a blockage, because people have been talking about this issue for a very long time. Various groups have a view on where the blockage might be. Given that we have to tackle the issue, I ask Ms Harkin-Kelly to outline her views on where the blockages are and what could be done to improve the level of skill mix within the health service in the short and long term. It is not something that can be fixed overnight.

Ms Harkin-Kelly referred to the broken spirit of nurses and midwives, and the general population of health service workers. What can we do about that? The purpose of the committee is to devise a plan, but a plan is completely useless unless we can get buy-in. How can we establish credibility among health care professionals?

We discussed the public-private ratio. I would be interested to hear views on the value for money we achieve for our spend on private health care versus how the money could be spent on or invested in the public health system.