James Reilly (Dublin North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Deputy raises an important point but the moratorium is being used in a focused fashion here. We employed 750 additional nurses last year. We want to have the nurse ratios and the skills mix done properly. We have a situation where we have some model four hospitals with nine nurses per health care assistant and others with 2.8 nurses per health care assistant. We have doctors doing nurses' work, nurses doing work that health care assistants could do and a whole mismatch of peoples' skills sets to the jobs they are being asked to do. That is where the future savings and efficiencies are.

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