Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Okay, I will give the Senator the high level detail and then I might come back to Mr. Lynch regarding the likely time saved. There is an area in the hospital which they call the hot block. This is the laboratories, emergency department, theatres and intensive care floor. For obvious reasons, this is where an awful lot of the time has to be spent. The clear view is that it is on the critical path and if we can pull that forward, it gives us the opportunity to pull forward the end of the commissioning. That is the short answer. We want to get into that block because it has all this very complicated stuff in it.

Before I hand over to Mr. Lynch, I will point out that one of things we could control is workforce. The original estimate for the new hospital was a workforce of 3,905 people. I am very happy to say, and colleagues will be aware, that we have been in an expansionary phase in the lifetime of this Government in terms of workforce. Rather than being at 3,905 people, CHI is now over 400 ahead of that at 4,334 people. These are all needed. We have introduced new services, for example, since that original number was estimated. It is one of the things we can control. We can make sure we have scaled up the workforces in Crumlin and Temple Street hospitals so that on the day of the move, so to speak, we have the full workforce available.