Tom Neville (Limerick County, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I express my gratitude to the delegates for coming before us to share their experiences of working on the front line. Their presentations have been educational. I have had a number of questions for management in the past few weeks and months but have found it very difficult to get answers to them. The testimony has filled in some of the grey areas. I appreciate the contributions of the delegates as a member of the committee but also personally. Everybody has different expertise and mine is in the clinical area and on the business or management side. Will the delegates tease out the recruitment matters? It was indicated that the national recruitment process was not connecting with the local process. If I remember correctly, candidates being screened were not being informed or matched specifically with teams. Will the delegates flesh it out? We are finding the big anomaly is in recruitment and that there has been a push-back by management which states it cannot find certain staff. I worked in recruitment for eight years. Mr. Walsh correctly referred to innovation within management and having to change things if they were not working. We know that the definition is doing the same thing again and again while expecting a different result. Recruitment is fluid.

Mr. Walsh also referred to the commission on nursing and how it discouraged people from going into management. Will he explain this a little more in order that we might be able to draw some correlations? I was unaware of it. He spoke about escalating to management proposals on how to improve matters, as have the others who presented. What type of engagement was forthcoming from management when the delegates took the time and made the effort to use their expertise to propose efficiencies or improvements? What was the process and was there any feedback? Was anything put in place?