Ms Phil Ní Sheaghdha:

As I said earlier, there are 125 nursing vacancies in University Hospital Limerick. The hospital is trying to open 90 additional beds but it has to fill the existing vacancies before it can start staffing those beds.

There is a great university in the mid-west as well as institutes of technology in Tralee and Castlebar. They should be running postgraduate courses for nurses in public health nursing, intensive care nursing and so on. More postgraduate courses for nurses should be provided locally so that nurses do not have to move back to the big cities to further their education.

I agree with Professor Irvine that the recruitment process is overly bureaucratic and overly centralised. It needs to be at the level of the hospital and community directors in order to speed it up.