Mr. Jim Breslin:

I will give the Deputy the example of nursing. What we are doing in nursing is being led by the chief nurse's office in the Department but, along with the HSE and all of the stakeholders, including the nursing unions, they have produced the research on nursing under the task force on staffing and skill mix. That has been able to identify, and they have gone into a number of wards at this stage, that even if the staff nurses, the agency and the overtime are identified on a ward and it is changed to a more stable workforce, it will not totally eliminate agency or overtime. There will be somebody, unpredictably, who gets ill and is gone for a period and somebody has to be called in. If annual leave, training courses, all of the natural things that happen in a year and so on are built into the roster and there are sufficient staff to cover that, it saves money, the quality of care indicators go up on that ward, the actual care that people receive improves and staff satisfaction goes up as well. We are successfully rolling out that model to wards across different sites and hope to do that across the whole hospital system.