Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Doherty for his comments. I have no doubt the Deputy is sincere in his concerns for Letterkenny General Hospital. We all need to be careful, however, when dealing with health issues, not to do down good hospitals or services in the belief that somehow that will generate more resources because, first, it does not and, second, it undermines public confidence in the health service, unnecessarily and unfairly in my view.

During my time working as a doctor I worked at eight different hospitals, all of which had spikes in activity from time to time. There are two ways of dealing with this. One can either have huge latent capacity staff waiting around in case a hospital gets busy, which is very wasteful, or one can have mechanisms in place to deal with spikes in demand, including, for example, going off-call. It would not, for example, be unusual in the city of Dublin for one of the accident and emergency departments to go off-call for a short time during busy periods. The work is then moved to other hospitals. Also, during a busy day at an emergency department when many people have to be admitted, it is not unusual for elective surgery to be cancelled. That is always the case. The only way around that is to have a huge number of unused staff and so on, which is very inefficient.

When it comes to agency staff, Letterkenny General Hospital spent €4.9 million in this area. As the public sector embargo is being relaxed, it will have much more flexibility next year to hire people on temporary contracts or as full-time employees instead of hiring them through agencies. Significant savings can be made through the hiring of people on temporary contracts rather than through agencies, which is very expensive.

I am not familiar with the statistics and data mentioned today by the Deputy. They were not given to me in advance. I am happy to receive them and have them examined. It is not my role as Minister for Health to decide the staffing levels or budgets of the 47 acute hospitals in the State. That is a decision for the HSE and the national director of hospitals and, in time, the south hospital group when fully up and running. I am happy to commit to having the statistics referred to by the Deputy examined to see if they stack up. I must clarify, however, that I do not make decisions in regard hospital staff or budgets.

See this speech in context