Mr. Jim Ryan:

It is an ongoing challenge. Part of the reason is that our staff are very highly trained and marketable across the world. We have seen that over recent years. In psychiatric nursing, we have increased the number of places in our third level colleges in the past four years. This year we will see the first group of additional nurses coming out in September, although they are already on units because of Covid. Next year, there will be a further tranche of additional nurses on top of those who would be traditionally trained through third level institutions. From the HSE's perspective, we invested in that because we saw the need and logic for those nurses. Similarly, with consultants, we have increased the number of basic specialist training, BST, and higher specialist training, HST, places in 2020 so that we might have a better pipeline of staff coming through in the next few years. Staffing by allied health professionals, AHPs, can be a challenge in some areas, particularly around psychology. This is something we are working on continuously. To answer the Deputy's question directly, it is an ongoing issue but one on which we are committed because we want to try to ensure that we have the proper staff in place for our service users.