David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will put a question to the Minister for Health. Yesterday, the HSE was before the committee. I welcome the recruitment of 700 swabbers and 500 tracers. I accept that it is good to have additional capacity for swabbing and, as the Minister said, the testing regime is complicated. It is not straightforward as there is swabbing and then the testing itself in laboratories. I believe we have two industrial laboratories and laboratories in hospitals that do the testing. We were told yesterday there are 350 staff at the moment and that will increase to more 1,000. That is a 300% increase. However, if these additional staff are recruited, where is the additional laboratory capacity? If more swabs are being done , we do not want to create a bottleneck where we do not have the additional laboratory capacity, which, in fact, will not make the difference it should. Where is the corresponding additional laboratory capacity to meet the increase in capacity in swabbing?

I have been contacted by the Diabetes Ireland, the Irish Dental Association and the Irish Heart Foundation who said that specialised nurses, occupational therapists and speech and language therapists were seconded into testing. Perhaps I am wrong, but I was told that some of them were directing traffic. These are specialist staff who should be doing what they need to be doing. Will they be seconded back to what they were doing as part of the recruitment of the 700 staff?

I will make final point on this because we do not have time to go over and back. I was disappointed that in the living with the virus plan we are discussing today there was no target regarding the number of tests and what capacity we have beyond the figure of 100,000.

The Minister said he is looking for an options paper from the HSE. It is still not clear whether that has been given to him. We need clear targets on this. We also need clear turnaround time targets but they were absent from this plan. That was a mistake because targets are good and mean we can then benchmark our position. In the absence of such targets we cannot. That was a mistake in the plan. I will leave those questions and take the responses.