Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)
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I will talk to the chief nurse about that. The very clear advice I have from the Department is that the figure of 2,000 additional nurses is what is required for phase 1 and phase 2, that is, all the medical and surgical wards and the emergency departments. I am advised that 1,500 of those are in situ and another 500, which are fully funded, are to be hired. If there are additional issues we will find them. I will give one quick example. There was a claim made in UHL that they were short, I think, 200 nurses for safe staffing. The chief nurse is also head of patient safety and leads on safe staffing. I asked her to go to UHL and do a quick audit to find out, because I was very concerned at this. What she found was that they were sufficiently staffed for safe staffing but it was not being implemented consistently. There were some wards where they were understaffed but, critically, there were other wards where they were overstaffed. Really what it required was consistency in application in the hospital. The claim of 200 staff was shown not to be the case.