Ms Yvonne O'Neill:

The points made here are relevant in terms of how we are trying to do the workforce planning piece for models of care in the areas of disability, mental health and older persons. When the service being sought is defined, then we can have a reasonable job description and a reasonable set of qualifications or otherwise for that purpose. I am conscious that we should acknowledge that there is a policy context around introducing regulation into this environment. Today's contributions are important to inform the committee's thinking about policy.

On the point about collaboration and the systems working together, in terms of the employment market, we have a problem as members will know from other engagements around home support-type workers, including PAs. Within our resource for PA and home support for disability, we have not yet reached at point where we have not been able to recruit what we need but we know we are in a problematic market. Some of the work we have tried to do across government is to say that there is a potential workforce who are precluded from applying for jobs because of the nature of their social benefits and how their benefits will be affected once a threshold is reached. Yet these people could be a very flexible workforce as they may be free in the morning or evening, depending on their other commitments. That is the type of collaboration to which the Deputy referred. We tried to do that through a cross government piece as well.