Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)

We are training more and we are trying to increase the number of clinical placements because the number of university places has been increased. Rachel and I have been working with CORU, the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Ireland and the Medical Council to try to improve registration times. I have a couple of updates. The Nursing and Midwifery Board of Ireland confirmed to us that more nurses trained in Ireland are staying in Ireland than ever before. CORU has improved its processing times for registration and reregistration very considerably, and that is an important part of it. The Medical Council has gone through a transformation since July. We had some very difficult conversations about patient safety where people were not being registered. There have been 1,846 doctors registered in the Irish system since July as a consequence of the excellent work done by the CEO and the management team in the Medical Council, and the complete elimination of the backlog that had been there for Irish doctors looking to be restored to the list. That is a very considerable capacity expansion. It is our intention and we want to hire these positions into our system. We are trying to come to it from every angle.