Mr. Paul Reid:

On the issue of recruitment, I spent a lot of time across the system in my first four months. In fact, tomorrow I am due to spend time in an acute setting to demonstrate my leadership and experience the issues people are encountering. I have no doubt that recruitment is part of the solution. We are going to inject and have been injecting. I need to indicate that we have recruited 1,138 people this year. We are almost 500 above our budgeted for headcount this year, or, to be precise, 485 above the planned improvement. Therefore, we have recruited and are continuing to recruit. We recruited 60 in August and are targeting dedicated recruitment. For example, we are in the process of recruiting graduate nurses, with a significant number of contracts offered on the community and acute sides. We want to recruit these graduates. As the national director, Mr. Liam Woods, said, we want to reduce our spend on agency staff as part of that process. I have no interest in increasing that spend and would rather have full-time staff. That is not a philosophy but a drive towards best practice.

On the issue of section 38 and section 39 organisations, I acknowledge that there is no extra focus being put on them. My communication yesterday was across the system, including section 38 and section 39 organisations, in managing the significant issues with which some of them are dealing. It has been presented to us a number of times and we have had some engagement with many of them. Certainly, the Catherine Day report sets out how we need to work with the section 38 and section 39 organisations in a stronger way. On controls and our management of the spend, they are the exact same controls we have in place across the HSE system. We value what they do and they are important, but we have the same controls in place.