Mr. Bernard Gloster:

I think it has to do with an observation I made earlier certainly on the allied health professionals side. We are expanding and developing services at a rate that exceeds the supply chain, if we want to call it that. International recruitment helps for a while with that but what happens is we eventually end up with a dependency on international recruitment that is greater then the domestic supply and that brings its own problems in terms of sustainability. The Minister for Health, Deputy Donnelly, has made very substantial inroads and representations to the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, Deputy Harris, around generating additional places at university level for the different disciplines. While there is a way to go on that, and we would like to see more, that is part of what we can do but it is a very long-term piece. In the future, we may have to look at instances where we set out a strategy and desire to have a particular way. For example, our desire might be to have 72 or 74 child and adolescent mental health teams and we know we are consistently struggling to populate those teams to the full amount.

The question arises, and it is one I cannot answer, as to whether it would be better to have 55 fully staffed teams and a slightly longer geographic distance or to struggle all of the time with 72 teams that have a variable level of staffing and team members who feel they cannot function to the full multidisciplinary level. That is something about which I would like to consult professionals and clinical staff. I do not think it is an arbitrary management decision but it seems to me to be one possibility. There is no easy answer to the global demand for healthcare staff, which is here now and will be long into the future.