Ms Eilísh Hardiman:

We want to increase this by another ten places in the undergraduate programme, so that is ten every year, and we then want to add to the postgraduate programme. There are only so many coming in every year and the real leverage is in the postgraduate area because we are taking from all of the nurses who graduate in adult services. That is what we have identified. We are then looking at the mix between healthcare assistants and nurses and how we can contemporise that. That is something we are looking at with the unions involved. We have sat down and we are doing this in a very collaborative way. It is not behind anyone's back and is done on the basis that we can do things differently. That is one of the things we are doing to ensure we do not have high-dependency nursing.

We are also quite willing to look at new ways of working, for example, physician assistants have been introduced in some of the public system and the private system. To us, that is using nursing resources better. We have identified there are elements of paediatric nursing where one does not need to be a paediatric specialist, such as in theatres. We are looking at all of those elements. That is all in what we call the supply and demand of nursing that we have mapped out. We have a process with the HSE to identify the needs because some of these will need to go into the Department of Education and Skills and other areas to effect those changes.