Ms Karen O'Sullivan:

There is a difficulty with providing a relief panel that will cover an entire county. If someone in Castletownbere telephones me to report that he or she has a desperate emergency due to a member of staff calling in sick, County Cork is a large county, and by the time a person has travelled from my office to Castletownbere, the session will have ended. The necessity to cover great distances makes providing a relief panel quite difficult. There are agencies and organisations that are working towards providing something akin to a nursing agency model. I mean a panel of relief staff that can be called upon to fill gaps in a service. I agree with the Deputy that staffing is a problem because the service provider has a legal obligation to ensure the correct number of staff are available at all times. There is no easy answer to providing relief staff.