Mr. Stephen Mulvany:

Retention and recruiting our own is the first port of call. We have and are offering every nursing graduate and health and social care profession graduate this year a permanent post in the HSE. On international recruitment, we have brought in approximately 1,400 nurses this year and we offer a relocation package. In other international recruitment, including doctors, we also offer relocation packages, which have a variety of elements including flights and support around accommodation in the initial weeks. We are also seeking to offer and secure retention of as many new graduates this year as we can. We need to grow the pipeline so that there are more graduates being trained, to whom we can then offer posts. On staffing, we are trying to make sure that we are doing something about safety issues around staffing levels and skills mix - one aspect of why we may have retention problems. It is about retention, first, and recruitment efforts at home and abroad; then there is the longer term issue of growing the number of placements for a bigger pipeline of graduates, which takes a long time.