Dr. Cillian De Gascun:

Ideally, we are looking for somebody with a background in science. Most of our staff would be either technical officers or medical laboratory scientists. There is a shortage of medical laboratory scientists across the country at the moment. From the point of view of training people up to operate these machines, they are very capable and many of them would have transitioned from existing work to work on Covid-19 testing. As the Deputy is aware, a lot of the demand in the health service declined significantly due to Covid-19 and we saw the same issues in the laboratories so people were transferred from operating perhaps in the sexual-health screening area and came across to work on Covid-19. It is well recognised that we need to invest in medical laboratory scientists.