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

I make three points. The first is that we are in a very different situation this year than we were for the last three or four years. The last three or four years were all about not recruiting and not filling vacancies and now, all of a sudden, the NRS has been told to recruit lots of people very quickly. It is a struggle to turn around from being an organisation that was about staff retrenchment to being one that is now about recruitment. However, we have 1,000 more people working in our health service today than we had this time last year, so it is happening, albeit not quickly enough.

Second, it is my intention to allow the groups to recruit in the medium term. That is difficult at present, for one very obvious reason, namely, the groups do not exist as legal entities; they are administrative bodies and do not exist in law and, therefore, cannot be employers. That is in stark contrast to the voluntary hospitals, which do exist in law and can be employers. If one works in a voluntary hospital like St. Vincent's or the Mater, one is not an employee of the HSE but an employee of St. Vincent's or the Mater, whereas an employee at Naas is an employee of the HSE. That is a complication that, as the Deputy will have noticed, is making the newspapers in various different ways in the last while.

Third, one downside of going back to allowing the groups to recruit is that we then go back to one of the problems that caused the NRS to be set up in the first place. Before the NRS was set up, people would go around doing interviews in four or five different health boards, and 6,000 to 7,000 days were lost every year with people doing one interview in the Southern Health Board, then one in the Midland Health Board and then one in the Western Health Board. When recruitment was centralised, the number of days lost to people doing interviews was reduced by 70%. One of the downsides of bringing that back and allowing local and group recruitment is that many more people will be looking for time off either to do interviews or to be on interview panels. We would have to bear that in mind given the impact it would have on patient care.

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