Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

There is something to be said for the HSE deciding that it will recruit staff to cover out-of-hours services, and I would appreciate it if the HSE were to pursue that.

I wish to get back to the issue of workforce planning. We had long discussions on this, as the witnesses will know, with Mr. Reid a number of weeks ago and we were promised a lot of material. We were told there were workforce plans and so on. There is no evidence of them. In the winter plan, there is a one-pager on workforce planning. I am just flabbergasted by the low level of workforce planning within the health service generally, at both Department level and HSE level. There is no medium-term planning, let alone long-term planning, and I just cannot understand why there is no serious function doing that. We end up, then, with money being provided for services, no staff being available, the HSE going all around the world spending a great deal of money and so on. The HSE does state in the winter plan that it will ask the emergency departments in hospitals and associated CHOs about this. The plan states that they "will outline what is required". It has been said delivery within six months is not possible, so why have the EDs and CHOs not outlined that long before now? Of those organisations, the EDs and the CHOs, which the HSE says will outline what is required, how many have provided plans in respect of the staff they need, and can the witnesses provide us with those plans?