Dr. Aine Burke:

We can link the consultant recruitment difficulties with the NTPF lists. We have widely acknowledged that there is a national difficulty in recruiting doctors and consultants, particularly in regional hospitals. I am based in the west and north west where there are examples of recruitment difficulties. For example, in Letterkenny four acute medicine posts have been brought to advertisement recently and there has been a failure to fill three of them. One third of the hospital's necessary radiologist posts are filled, while half of the emergency department posts are filled on a permanent basis. There is a difficulty in filling posts in Mayo University Hospital and Sligo where posts must be advertised two, three or more times. Some of them remain unfilled. The effect is that in County Mayo there are over 8,000 people waiting for an outpatient appointment, according to the NTPF waiting lists. In County Sligo there are almost 17,000 people on the lists, while in Letterkenny there are just under 18,000 on the lists. Between the three hospitals which have clear difficulties in recruiting consultants, there are 22,800 people waiting for over six months to be seen at an outpatient clinic. We can directly correlate the recruitment difficulties with the long NTPF waiting lists.