Mr. Paul Reid:

I will take the second point first and then address consultant numbers and the recruitment process.

On the second point, I do not know what the Senator's examples are so I cannot comment specifically on them. I can say the following, however: in the six months I have been here, I have been around most of the settings, everywhere from Letterkenny and the west and south-east coasts to the Dublin locations and the midlands. I have been to hospital, acute, community, social care and section 38 settings. In those visits, I do not spend my time just with management. I have a brief 35-minute meeting with management and I spend at least four hours walking around talking to staff. I generally spend my lunch with a group of staff who decide they want to sit beside me. I get regular and frequent feedback on the issues from staff. This has been very valuable for me. It is the way I operate. It is a management style I have and it has informed me greatly about some of the challenges we face in tackling some of the pressures in the health system. I have been very open with staff and I have been very engaged. From the feedback I have got, I believe staff feel there is now a chance to raise the real issues they are experiencing. I have spent a significant amount of my time on staff engagement. I spend at least a day and a half per fortnight out in the settings. That is how I operate. The feedback indicates very informally the real issues that arise in the various settings, not just the acute settings but also the community settings. The Minister was touching on process earlier but the feedback is informing me about a number of issues, the first being how those at the HSE centre really need to consider what they are doing and make sure it is adding value for staff at the front line in services and social care. As I said my opening statement, that is a process I have commenced already. We are going to examine what we do in the centre and ask whether it adds value for front-line staff. If not, we will stop it. I have very firmly flipped my focus onto our front-line service delivery teams to determine the issues that arise for them and how we need to address them.

In our staff satisfaction survey, which was published just last December, there were some very real issues arising over control culture. People were feeling very motivated in their own jobs but not connected to middle and senior management. They did not feel they were able to raise issues. That is something I am very conscious of and that I want to change. That is why I am spending my time in the acute setting. I reassure the Senator that I am very happy to tackle or examine any specific issues the Senator has. My personal style is a leadership style. I have been in the private sector, the not-for-profit sector, central government, local government and now the HSE. I can only demonstrate by what I do. I have outlined what I do.

The second issue, that of consultant posts, is a very genuine one. We are all aware it is not just an Irish issue but that it is also a global one.

We are making progress, but it is slow. We want to recruit more consultants. We have more capacity to recruit more consultants and more funding in our plan next year to do so. We are seeing the beginning of a more positive trend this year. As I mentioned, year on year we have 142 extra consultants and 135 since January. The net figure, because we are losing some, is an increase of 90 consultants this year, which is the start of a trend.

Deputy O'Reilly mentioned the time lag. It is too long. We are running some pilot projects on doing that more locally and that is probably a better way to progress quickly, but we will work with the Public Appointments Service, PAS, in that regard. We have some numbers by speciality across the country, that is, the number of consultants we have by country, by speciality and by hospital. We will be happy to provide those to the committee.