Mr. Liam Woods:

On the timing of delivery, the key requirements for the HSE, apart from funding approval to act within the resources provided by the Oireachtas, is recruitment. For us, the timescale around recruitment is between six months and one year, realistically, depending on the type of staff. Consultant staff can take up to a year to recruit and that is the sort of timescale we work to actioning additional services provided through consultants. We can recruit other staff grades more quickly. A challenge we face is that if we run a competition to recruit any grade, be it a nurse, paramedic or other staff, half the applications will come from within our organisation.

Therefore, we often have to go through two processes to get staff. There are issues associated with staffing.

The current physical hospital infrastructure is close to capacity. We have examined what we could do additionally. The beds we are opening this year are in spaces we can readily make available by doing relatively minor capital works. The timing for capital works is more significant. One of the reasons we emphasise community services for this time period is that, while they are required, we can contract and put them in place more quickly or employ staff to put them in place more quickly.

The capacity study at a wider level that is to be undertaken by the Department of Health, into which we will certainly have an input, will identify both the current and future requirements for bed capacity in the system. The Deputy's question was on the volume of service we need to stay with the demographic and catch up with the current demand for service, which will remain as we are pushed by the demographic. I expect that will be considered output of the capacity study itself. We have considered that in terms of our own view of the capacity we have and what we need.

Timescales to implement significant new hospital infrastructural projects are typically between three and five years. If one is considering structures such as ward blocks or substantial hospital expansion, those timescales typically apply. We have examined other options that may be available to us in order to move more quickly but, typically for a substantial hospital build, it takes three to five years to go through design, planning, construction, completion and the handover.