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

With the greatest respect to the Deputy, he is conflating two different issues, namely, agency staff and permanent contracts.

There are 2,600 consultants in the system, 2,200 of whom are permanent staff and 295 dentists, of whom 275 are permanent. The vast majority of consultant and dentist staff are permanent but of the 5,000 non-consultant hospital doctors only 66 are permanent, the reason being that the nature of being a non-consultant hospital doctor is to rotate from job to job every four or six months. It is not a permanent post but rather it is a training post whereby doctors move from hospital to hospital or to a post in the community in order to learn their job. It is only when a doctor has learned the job and earned his or her certificate of training or becomes a specialist, that he or she is appointed to a permanent post.

The situation is different in the case of agency staff. The use of agency staff arises where the hospital is unable to fill a post, either because nobody has applied or else to fill in for maternity leave or sick leave or to fill a vacancy which arises for some other reason. The reason agency costs have risen so high is because it has been so difficult to fill consultant posts on current salaries and to fill NCHD posts in certain remote parts of the country where it is difficult to get doctors to relocate for work.

A detailed breakdown of the expenditure on agency staff is published monthly in the HSE's performance assurance report, PAR, which is available on its website.

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