Ms Catherine Keogh:

I will provide an example that might better illustrate things. The senior posts are those in respect of which one finds this happening in the most. These are done as a national panel. Let us say that I am a senior occupational therapist, OT, and I want to become a senior OT as a basic grade. I see a national panel and I apply for it. Equally, I am already a senior OT but want to move to a different area geographically and the only way I can do so is by applying for the national panel. In 2016, in the case of 20-odd positions - we can share this information with the committee because the HSE has shared it with us - a great amount of work was done by the NRS to qualify 425 active candidates for an OT panel which ran for three years. There are still 400 people on that panel because most of those who were offered jobs did not want them because they were not in the right geographical areas. We were given figures at the Workplace Relations Commission, WRC, which indicate that 50% to 60% of any panel at any time is made up of already established HSE staff. From an administrative and resource point of view, a great amount of work goes into qualifying all of these people, when they do not really want to be on the relevant panel. They want to be on transfer panels, which is understandable. They are young, they qualify from college, they take their first jobs and they may want to move back home due to family commitments and all that goes with such commitments. Following two extensions, the 2016 panel with the 425 qualified candidates on it expired on 10 October last. Those 425 people are still looking to be moved around the country and they have nowhere to go. They will start being reinterviewed next year in order to be placed on another panel. A supplementary panel with 224 people on it now takes over. The NRS will start working its way down through that, offering jobs to people because there is no geographical alignment.