Dr. Brendan Doody:

It was with great regret that we had to take the decision to temporarily reduce the number of beds. There is a particular pressure in staffing, which my colleagues can also discuss, with regard to the provision of nursing. As we said, more than 75% of the multidisciplinary staffing in an inpatient setting is nursing staff. In other words, for us to be able to continue to provide that service, and it is a very specialist inpatient service, we must have adequate staffing. From an inpatient perspective, our ask is to look at what the fixes are with regard to being able to provide adequate nursing for the inpatient service. That is probably a much broader question. Some of the things are within our control and some of them are outside our control.

One difficulty has been that as we develop services in the community, and we talked about developing our community specialist eating disorder service, developing our additional community team in Kildare-west Wicklow and developing our ADHD ADMiRE pathway, often one is pulling from a small resource to begin with. In other words, staff, rather than leaving the service, are moving to other opportunities within the service. As we develop services, the ask is for the workforce planning to match that so we can be assured that we have the staff in place to fill these services, rather than taking staff from other services.