Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 26 May 2022

Public Accounts Committee

2020 Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 38 - Health (Resumed)
Health Service Executive: Financial Statements 2020

9:30 am

Mr. Stephen Mulvany:

Absolutely. I apologise. I am getting there. The first step in looking at that is obviously to examine the beds. We then have to do two key pieces that the VFM report outlines. One is that we need to introduce the interRAI assessment tool across the health sector, which is a standard assessment tool. We have plans to recruit 128 assessors by the end of the year, with the first 26 being recruited in July. So far, we are on track for that. The other piece is we need to close out with the Department is a longer piece of work to do, within the safe staffing framework, including figuring out the right mix of staff between healthcare assistants and nurses for different complexities of patient. That is a big issue that came up in the expert panel report on nursing homes in mid-2020 and it was picked up again in the VFM report. There is nothing in the VFM report that necessarily says that the level of staffing in the HSE is inappropriate. If anything, it is likely the private sector nursing home staff will have risen and need to rise-----