Dr. Roy Browne:

I think part of the question concerned what we do about pre-recruiting, so to speak, and being prepared to replace someone who is retiring. We know that most consultants contractually finish at 65. We know their dates of birth, so it is not beyond the wit of man to recognise when they will leave. Some may wish to go earlier. If so, they must give two months' notice, which is obviously a difficulty if one has only two months to recruit. The recruitment process is very independent of the HSE. It is carried out through the Public Appointments Service. It involves a very detailed description of the job in a particular layout, including the resources that are available to the applicant to do the job. This goes to the consultant appointments unit where it is then compared with the national programmes. The question is asked whether this consultant post needs to be refilled. Generally, it does. As Deputy Brassil said, if someone is doing a necessary job and then leaves, someone is needed to replace him or her. Once this process happens, which takes place over the space of about two or three months, it then goes to the recruitment process, which probably takes, through the Public Appointments Service, PAS, three or four months to advertise, shortlist and interview. Then we run into the difficulty that we are often bringing people back to Ireland from jobs abroad if they are finishing their training or something like that. They have a period of 180 days to meet specialist registration requirements, so then there is the difficulty of getting them a start date for work. Therefore, as Dr. O'Hanlon said, we are often talking about in excess of a year to progress this. This still misses the point that once we have gone to the PAS and the candidates have been interviewed and so on, I turn up on the interview panels and one or two people turn up to be interviewed, some of whom are not suitable for the job. Therefore, even as we go through the recruitment process, we run into difficulties at each step.

One thing I will say more generally about mental health services and recruitment is that, as Dr. O'Hanlon said, there are national panels. There are people who are offered jobs in Dublin who are living in Cork. They have two weeks to refuse the job and it goes to the next person on the panel. If there is a panel of 80 people, it can be seen that a year later, the last person, who is now in Donegal and wants to work in Cork, is being offered the post he or she wants. This is a huge difficulty.