Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)
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In Tallaght University Hospital, just in the lifetime of this Government, the increase in the nursing workforce has been over 50%. There are an extra 620 nurses working in Tallaght University Hospital today who were not there four years ago. That is a vast increase, and they are doing great work. As a result of this increase, the waiting times at the hospital are falling and the surgical waiting times are falling, but what the Chair said is completely on the money. We are only halfway through, and it is not everywhere. For example, a woman referred for gynaecology in Sligo four years ago would have waited four years. She is now waiting about six weeks because there are new services in place, but it is not universal. There are other services where we still have a long way to go.

Coming back to where we started as regards the staff, I have no doubt that the extra 2,000 staff the HSE hired - it hired 8,000 - are doing good work. I also have no doubt that every principal in Ireland could hire more teachers, and if they could, they would provide better education to their pupils, and that if every Garda inspector in Ireland could hire as many gardaí as he or she wanted locally, crime rates would fall further. It is the same in healthcare: if you can hire more and more people, you should be able to provide more and more services. However, you have to say, "This is what the taxpayer has funded", and you have to do your best within that, particularly in a world where there has been unprecedented growth. That is why the productivity agenda is so important. My view - and I think it is a view shared by colleagues on the committee - is that there is definitely more patient care that can be delivered for the current level of resource. Some parts of our service are really productive, and some parts of it just are not. The theatre utilisation rates in some of the hospitals just is not acceptable. The lack of outpatient clinics being run on Saturdays in some of our hospitals is not acceptable, given that so many of our consultants are now on the new public-only contract and we are paying them a lot more money to be available on Saturdays. That is not to have a go at the consultant. The consultant will quite fairly say, "Well, hang on a second. I need the administrator, the therapist and access to diagnostics." There is much more we can get out of what we already have. At the same time, obviously, we have to continue to expand.