David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome our witnesses. I would anticipate that this is Mr. Reid's last meeting with the committee and I will maybe say a few words on that at the end of my contribution.

I will start with workforce planning as this is one of the issues we wanted to discuss with Mr. Reid and Mr. Watt. We had a constructive meeting on the regional health areas in the Department of Health some time ago. Workforce planning was identified as one of the key issues affecting the health service and requiring more attention if we want to be successful in transforming healthcare. Training, recruitment and retention are the three elements involved. I will not have time to deal with all of them in one contribution so I will focus on training. Correct me if I am wrong, but I did not see anything in yesterday's budget on workforce planning. Nor did I see anything about expanding graduate and undergraduate training places in healthcare or in relation to specialist or intern training places. Was there anything in the budget on increased funding for workforce planning?