Ms Niamh O'Beirne:

We began the recruitment process in August. Role descriptions had to be developed, approved and put out. They went out over August with the bigger campaign beginning in September. We received 2,500 applications. We had to go through them, interview people and then go through standard compliance checking. That is what has been going on over the past number of weeks and months to bring in the staff we have had.

It is not ideal that we did not have enough staff for the number of cases of the virus in the country. In early October, cases increased from 544 to 1,000 overnight. We missed all of the numbers in between. There was a jump. We moved from 8,500 calls six weeks ago to nearly 40,000 calls. We had met demand, but it exceeded the capacity we had at that time. We will continue to recruit and are working very hard on that. Training and onboarding has to be done in a managed and quality assured way and everything requires clinical cover.