Mr. Paul Bell:

As the opening statement has been submitted for the record, I will just summarise. SIPTU contends the challenge of childcare for healthcare workers could have been managed more effectively by Government by focusing on securing support through measures which would have been approved by public health officials. An example would have been the provision of childcare in a safe environment explicitly for healthcare workers. This model was used in other countries to ensure essential healthcare workers could get to work in the safe knowledge their children were being cared for. Instead, the focus was on uniformity with rigid options only being approved which resulted in the loss of essential healthcare workers to the service and loss of annual leave or financial loss to the healthcare worker. We thank the committee for the opportunity to meet with it today.