Anne Rabbitte (Galway East, Fianna Fail)
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I do not think it was offered in the Deputy's area, to be quite honest.

On the point raised, and this is where I need assistance - Ministers sometimes need assistance and I have no problem in asking for that - it is correct to say there is capacity. If I am able to procure 1,800 therapists or interventions and 2,500 interventions in the private market, it tells me we have therapists available. There is no denying that and that sits under the HSE framework. These professionals are all on the island of Ireland. We sometimes bring in psychologists from Northern Ireland to assist with finishing some complex cases. We did it in the past. However, without breaking public pay or upsetting it all, there must be mechanisms by which we could make it attractive. I would certainly love to take everybody in the private system to come and work within my CDNT teams. All I do is spend money in the private area that I am not able to resource in the public system. I have 700 fully funded vacancies, but the money I spend on the other side is money that I would prefer to be spending on recruitment and putting staff in place. I am only moving the money around so that children get the intervention, but if there were a more attractive way of recruiting, or if the HSE could come up with more novel ways to recruit, or if we allowed more flexibility to the likes of the Cope Foundation or the Brothers of Charity to attract in staff onto their teams that are part of our assessment of needs or are a part of their CDNT teams, I would certainly take it.

The final piece on recruitment is that we offer very attractive relocation packages from abroad. We track where people have gone for speech and language therapy or physiotherapy, in Holland or wherever they have gone because they might not have got the crazy points to go onto a team or go into college here, and work on how we might bring them back. We are looking at how we can work with CORU in ensuring that their regulation meets it, so to speak. The relocation package is €4,500 to bring a person home to work on one of our teams. We are also working with the colleges, as students are exiting, to capture them at the end. We need, perhaps, to change how we finish college work. If a person is training in nursing or as a nurse, that person will finish up their degree qualification on the ward. With our health and social care people, we bring them back into college. We break the link with wherever they had been last. Normally in fourth year, students show their preference or where they would like to specialise, for example, they may be in disability. Maybe we need to work on actually keeping them in their position as opposed to them going back into college and not breaking the link. It is something I am working on with CORU to see how we could make that happen. We are at all times trying to find novel and pragmatic ways to attract people into disabilities. I carried over a vacancy level of 189 posts from last year and I was fortunate enough that I could do so on top of the 700. At the start of the year, I had at the guts of 900 vacancies across disability.