Ms Paula Kelly:

I will answer the first question about trainees coming through. The number is not always eight; it fluctuates a little bit. Unfortunately, the SpR depends on what they want to do. Every orthopaedic surgeon who comes to the end of training picks a sub-speciality. If they are doing adult arthroplasty, they would do a two-year fellowship in that. Every sub-speciality does a training of one year or two years. Nobody goes into a job unless they want to so we could not specifically have two or one paediatric slots. It has to be the surgeon who wants to do the sub-speciality.

We do manpower planning and five years ago we aspired to having 14 surgeons in CHI. We have achieved that, which is fantastic. We need to look at that on an annual basis as surgeons may leave or retire. It is part of our orthopaedic development goals to look at manpower planning. Our biggest issue at the moment is nursing. We need many more nurses specialised in paediatric orthopaedics.