David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

That is really welcome. When I hear the word "mandate" I think that is exactly what we need to hear. Where there is best practice, it needs to be mandated. We need to move away from talk of "encouraging" and saying we will talk about something and examine it. Where things need to be done, they need to be done and we need decisive leadership. I welcome the fresh approach Mr. Gloster is taking. When he talks about mandating, that is what we need to hear.

There are two other issues I want to raise and time is tight. The committee had a very distressing session a number of months ago with front-line healthcare trade unions, or trade unions representing front-line healthcare workers. They raised issues around the high level of assaults. I know those numbers came down in the first quarter of this year but there are also issues around how the HSE deals with bullying within the organisation. I ask Mr. Gloster to give us an understanding of those two areas and to explain what changes, if any, he intends to make to protect the welfare and safety of those on the front line.

I have been raising the outsourcing of healthcare for some time. We are talking about the service plan and the spend of money. We are spending hundreds of millions of euro outsourcing and a lot of that is on management consultancy. We saw what happened in a hospital in Cork recently. We have established a cottage industry, to be honest, of management consultancy and outsourcing where huge amounts of profit are being made. A lot of that should be done in-house. Is that something Mr. Gloster has examined? Does he want to take a different approach? We have to start reining in that spending and ensuring there is not such an overreliance on management consultancy.