Mr. Bernard Gloster:

I will come back specifically to the UHL figures. I will get the breakdown of the detail for Deputy Wynne. If we do not even go back a year, but we go back to last Christmas, in terms of the overall nursing and midwifery workforce in the HSE, there were 43,619 whole-time equivalents and by September of this year that had gone up to 45,000. That is a significant growth. It is a very large growth. There are always going to be vacancies in any system of this size. That is never going to let out. What the Deputy would not necessarily see in the performance report or in the response to a parliamentary question is that when a hospital might say it has a vacancy of 44.6 WTEs in its emergency department, it is not then reflecting the number of agency staff and amount of overtime it is using to supplement. It is not that 46 people are missing off the floor. I have no doubt there are some vacancies, so I do not want to be in any way disparaging to people in individual hospitals. Absenteeism in the Irish health service is a very variable quantum. We used to have an industry average one time of 3.5%. I do not think we ever got there. Probably 4.5% would be a more acceptable position. I think generally we are in the 6% territory. There are lots of factors to do with absenteeism. I have no doubt that some of them are work related. It is a very difficult and pressured system to work in and the exposure rates are high.

I want to go back to an earlier piece. Maybe I will become a victim of my own words. I do not want to say that I am not going to be compassionate to Limerick or anywhere else. Limerick has the same challenges as Cork University Hospital or Galway, in different ways. The particular compassionate piece I was talking about was an older person leaving hospital where there was a home help ready to help them. That is the direct connection. Limerick will not be exempted from the recruitment policy no more than anywhere else between now and Christmas. That will not be the case.