Anne Rabbitte (Galway East, Fianna Fail)
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I thank the Deputy for that question. She is dead right. If I had all the money in the world in the morning and I wanted to hand it all over to the HSE, we could not recruit because the people are not there. There is an issue with the supply pipeline. We are all drawing from the same pool of people. I refer to the gamut of services, including primary care, private practice, disability services, services for older people and acute services. We might have only 400 occupational therapists coming through on an annual basis and they have the pick of the services. Hence, there is movement of staff from disability services to primary care to acute services. People can move up the ranks quickly because there is a such a shortage of staff. The Deputy asked whether that conversation happened. The answer to that question is "Yes". Was it productive? It was, very much so. I have also met the leads in the areas of occupational therapy, physiotherapy, CORU and the universities to engage in this conversation. There is an appetite to increase the numbers and to work more closely within health to provide work experience, give people the opportunity to participate and to provide longer placements. That could be used as a buffer while we are bringing more people on stream.

If I had my wish in the morning, I would like to recruit individuals from the various faculties who could populate my PDS teams. I could have an additional speech and language therapist who could do an extra placement with clinical supervision. Professor MacLachlan might comment on that with respect to occupational therapists, physiotherapists and speech and language therapists. I would have extra people in our services. A positive aspect of that is it would give them good experience and, hopefully, they would consider returning to work in disability services. Perhaps we could then consider bringing in alternative grades of progression to retain people in disability services. There must be a career pathway within our teams. We have not even got to the stage of having that conversation because we are work to ensure we have enough staff to fill the vacant posts.

We are losing staff to our brothers and sisters in the HSE, be it in primary care services, services for older persons or acute services. We need to increase our capacity in terms of our intake of people and I am having that conversation. Professor MacLachlan might like to comment on the provision of work experience, similar to what is being done with third-year and fourth-year student teacher who gain experience as substitute teachers. We would have more of an intake to have those people within our teams. It would help our capacity in the context of delivering services.