Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy. The point he is making essentially concerns whether we are going to get to enough ICU beds by the end of next year. No, we are not. It has to be a multi-year program. We have worked closely with the HSE to determine what is possible. For example, the HSE had planned to introduce some beds in quarter 1 of 2022. We worked with them to say, "No, we will get them in in the coming year. Let us fund them. Let us push it." For the very reasons the Deputy has outlined, we have to do it over several years. If it were just a question of getting the beds and buying the kit and facilities around it, that would not be a problem. However, each bed needs six full-time staff and they are highly specialised. The HSE, during the outbreak, trained about 1,400 nurses with ICU skills but it is an important point that we miss sometimes that they are not designated ICU specialists. They have additional training so they can step in but we need full specialist training for the nurses in ICU to be completed. What we have in the budget for next year and what we are working through in the service plan is what we think is at the outer edge of what is possible. I want to do the same thing the following year and the following year again because I think we came into this year with 252 beds or thereabouts and it is acknowledged across the system that this is a serious deficit. We have an ambitious programme in place for the next few years to deal with that.