Ms Phil Ní Sheaghdha:

The NHS publishes its winter plan much earlier. We have requested that the winter plan be published towards the end of August. The response we get from the HSE is that it is planning all year for the winter. I am not being flippant about it but we know that the overcrowding figures have increased significantly this year during the summer. They are moving towards 100,000 and it is early November, so we know that whatever plan is there is obviously not working. We are advised that the winter plan will be published this Thursday, which is tomorrow. We expect that there will be some announcement in respect of the additional provision of home care packages and services through the National Treatment Purchase Fund. If there are announcements around additional beds at this point in the year, it will be impossible to staff those beds because the pause will remain in place and the pause has caused people who graduated in Ireland to make decisions around where they work. We managed to increase the number of graduates who were employed, but not all of them were offered jobs and they do not hang around. This is the point we made earlier. Likewise, when a service is working short-term continuously, people do have choices and there is a really active recruitment campaign from the UK and the private hospitals in Ireland. If the announcement indicates that additional beds, which we know are needed in community settings and in long-term and step-down care, will be made available, our fear is that it will be impossible to open them because the staffing crisis is such that we do not have staff to recruit to staff those beds.