Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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No, we actually fulfil our WHO obligations in this way, but I take the Deputy's point. I would like to put some figures on the record of this committee, because I believe they are important. I accept there is a challenge in respect of recruitment and retention and that pay parity needs to be addressed. I have said that, I believe it, and I do not disagree with Deputy O'Connell in that regard. There is the whole-time equivalent of 3,153 consultants in the Irish public health service. More than 600 additional consultants have been recruited over the past five years and 139 additional consultants have begun working in the health service over the last 12 months. While I accept there is a challenge in respect of recruitment and retention, people are sometimes of the opinion that there are now fewer doctors and that we are losing doctors. The statistics do not show that. More than 600 additional doctors have entered the health service over the past five years, including 139 over the past 12 months. That does not take away from the point Deputy O'Connell makes about the very significant issues in recruitment and retention. The CEO will speak to vacancy levels and so on in a moment.

I am deadly serious about sitting down with consultant representative bodies to do two things. I want to address the immediate challenges with regard to recruitment and retention, of which I accept pay is an element. I also want to build on the Public Sector Pay Commission's findings. The Deputy should remember that we, as a Government, saw this as such an issue that we asked the Public Sector Pay Commission to carry out a body a work on it. The commission told us to sit down and engage and I want to do that.

I will need the help of the consultants to do the second thing I want to do. Deputy O'Connell talked about the delivery of Sláintecare, into which she has put a lot of work and a lot of her personal time. It is disappointing that, every time we move forward with an element of Sláintecare, I hear from the representative bodies that they do not agree with it. The speed at which the de Buitléir report was dismissed by representative bodies is very disappointing. The Deputy talked about international comparisons. The OECD report I commissioned, which we also published that day, shows that Ireland is out of sync with other countries in respect of private practice in public hospitals. Phase 1 - and it will have to be phase 1 because sequencing is important - will have to be talking about the immediate recruitment and retention challenges, of which pay parity is an element. That needs to be done before we can talk about reform. We will start that process with the INMO next week. I want to expand those talks to include other bodies such as the Irish Hospital Consultants Association in due course.

We will then need to move to phase 2, which will have to be about the Sláintecare reform agenda. I accept that one cannot be done without the other. We have very hard-working doctors working under a lot of pressure and they need to realise that the political system and I want to support them.