Mr. Dean Sullivan:

I will replay some of the headlines around this issue, about which Ms Rosarii Mannion and Professor Frank Murray spoke to the committee on 2 May last. Since 2008, the HSE has required consultants to be on the relevant specialist division of the Medical Council's register of medical practitioners. This is a means of ensuring consultants in Ireland have the necessary training, skills, competencies and qualifications. As of April 2018, the position with regard to what the Deputy has asked about is that 4.3%, or approximately one in 25, of the 3,000-strong consultant workforce in the South is not on the specialist register. Of the 127 individuals who are not on the register, 52 relate to the period before the requirement was introduced in 2008 and 75 relate to the period after 2008. As the committee discussed last week, processes are ongoing to identify the consultants who were in their posts before 2008 and who have the necessary skills to be on the relevant register but have not yet chosen to put themselves forward for inclusion on it, and to encourage them to do so. Processes are also in place to upskill, as required, those other pre-2008 consultants to bring them to the necessary standard. I hope Professor Murray has given the committee further details in that regard. The process for post-2008 individuals is largely a consequence of the inevitable delays that are experienced when we try to fill posts within the system, whether on the hospital side of the house or on the mental health side of the house. Those delays are probably - almost certainly - too long at the moment.

Professor Murray will work with relevant colleagues in relevant agencies to look at options to reduce the amount of time it takes to fill a post after it is created as a new post, or becomes vacant and is identified as needing to be filled. This will remain an issue in light of the pattern of services we have in Ireland at present. There are some posts that are difficult to fill, unfortunately. This becomes one of the symptoms of that challenge. I am from the North, where we have exactly the same difficulty because certain posts at some of the smaller sites are harder to fill. As I alluded to in my opening remarks, one way of beginning to provide additional assurances in this respect and getting around the recruitment difficulty is to provide for better networking when smaller sites are joined into the smaller sites. In cases in which we have difficulties because of individuals in posts who are not on the specialist register, I assure the committee that appropriate assurances and governance arrangements are in place in community healthcare organisations and hospital groups to provide the necessary scrutiny of their day-to-day practices.