Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for the question. As the Deputy knows, Mallow General Hospital is part of the South/South West hospital group. It is a model 2 hospital providing acute general hospital services to the people of north Cork. The hospital has 54 acute beds, in excess of 220 staff and a budget of approximately €17.5 million in 2018.

There are approximately 20 staff vacancies at present in Mallow General Hospital across medical, nursing and health and social care. The HSE has advised me that the overwhelming majority of these posts have been sanctioned for funding and we are awaiting the advertisement through the national recruitment services division. I will ask for that to happen urgently.

Retaining and increasing the number of nursing, medical and health and social care staff in the public health service is a key priority. The total number of consultants, non-consultant hospital doctors and nurses has increased despite these challenges.

I have no doubt that we need to continue to do more, not just in Mallow General Hospital but in all of our model 2 hospitals. I had the pleasure of visiting Bantry General Hospital and Clonakilty Community Hospital this week as well. There is definitely capacity in some of our smaller hospitals and I want to see us do more there. I am told that there are very few medical post vacancies in Mallow General Hospital and the majority of vacancies are nursing posts. I would be very happy to visit Mallow General Hospital in due course to meet the management there and to look at what the opportunities are to expand services there.

One of the areas that I am particularly interested in is whether we can take pressure off the larger hospitals where there is bed capacity in some smaller hospitals and whether we can use the National Treatment Purchase Fund, NTPF, to insource into some of our smaller hospitals as well as outsourcing. There is more that we can do in these hospitals and Mallow General Hospital certainly has an important role to play.

See this speech in context