Dr. Colm Henry:

I can assure the Deputy that there is long-term planning to reduce our dependency on non-training posts because they are not good for doctors and do not place people on training schemes to a specific end point where they would become consultants, having fulfilled the criteria for a training scheme, or GPs, public health specialists or whatever it may be. Repeating a situation where we create additional non-training posts in hospitals just increases our dependency on these posts. Our manpower planning is focused on increasing the number of training posts and converting these non-training posts into training posts by creating an additional number of consultant posts and an additional number of higher specialist trainees in order that we do not have a-----