Ms Louise McGirr:

From the Department's perspective, where we ideally want to go with the HSE is to a safe level of staffing. The chief nurse can give more detail on that. Ultimately, that is an objective measure of the safe number of staff within a service. That includes absence, sick leave, maternity leave and all sorts of other things and provides an objective benchmark as to the staffing requirements in a service.

That is really the gold standard of where we want to be across all our services. It is not yet rolled out across all services. That is what we aim for and that is the appropriate level of staffing. In terms of conversion, we approved a conversion for safe staffing within the budget and there is a further proposal, as Mr. Gloster outlined, to convert more staff where there are high agency costs - front-line staff. We are supportive of that approach to conversion.