Ms Anne O'Connor:

Before I hand over to Dr. Burke, I will address the point made by the Senator about recruitment in rural areas. Across the board, whether it is in our mental health services or acute hospital services, we are very challenged at times to get people to move into specialist services when they are not close to the big teaching hospitals. We have seen that in this case and, unfortunately, we see it in a number of specialty areas. This is a challenge we have in the system. We must look at how we can work differently. Telehealth has certainly supported this across a range of specialties, particularly building on the Covid experience. There is an onus on us to work differently.

There is also an onus around the broader recruitment piece. We have initiated a lot of work in the past 18 months with the Public Appointments Service, PAS, which carries out our consultant recruitment, to improve that process. We are working very closely with PAS, which has put in place significant changes and great additionality in respect of recruitment capacity to speed up that process. The Senator is absolutely right that we can identify people and yet it can take a very long time.

One of the key challenges too is that we must stop thinking about consultants in isolation. Advertising for a consultant post on its own is no longer enough. We must, in effect, sell the whole service. For example, when establishing a new team that is funded through development funding, we would promote that as a team so that a consultant coming in knows that he or she has people around them. One consultant on his or her own cannot deliver everything that we ask in the absence of having a team. I will ask Dr. Burke to comment also.