Mary Harney (Dublin Mid West, Progressive Democrats)

I propose to take Questions Nos. 6 and 74 together.

The aim of the HSE's transformation programme is to have 530 primary care teams developed by 2011. A total of 110 teams are in place at the moment. The health professionals in these teams are holding clinical team meetings and delivering integrated comprehensive care to patients. The HSE aims to have a further 100 teams in place by the end of 2009. A number of these teams are at varying stages of development. Many have initial team members identified, while some have staff assigned and are holding team development meetings. The remaining 320 teams will be developed over the period up to 2011.

The continued roll out of primary care teams will be achieved primarily by assigning existing professional and other staff working in primary, community and continuing care services to the teams. Each local health office is developing plans to reconfigure existing community clinical and other staff in this way. Over 850 health professionals have already been assigned to primary care teams and a further 2,700 staff have been identified who will work in primary care teams as the extra teams are rolled out.

The moratorium on recruitment and promotion does not apply to allied health professionals such as speech and language therapists, physiotherapists, occupational therapists and social workers. In fact, these will be increased in order to support the delivery of integrated services to groups like the elderly, children at risk and people with a disability. The HSE also intends, as part of its overall transformation programme, to redeploy into community services a significant number of staff from acute hospitals and corporate functions. The steps necessary to give effect to this are currently being finalised.

A programme to lease 200 new primary care centres from the private sector was announced in the budget. Primary care teams are using, and will continue to use, existing HSE buildings and some of the new centres will accommodate more than one primary care team. The HSE board has already approved the commencement of negotiations in 150 locations and contracts are being finalised for 70 of these. The first group of 80 is due to open next year and the full complement is due to open in 2011.

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