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

The Deputy asked some very specific questions about CHO 1 and Letterkenny University Hospital. I am afraid I do not have the necessary details in order to give him answers on that, but I will ask the Minister for Health to do so via correspondence. I can, however, comment on the wider picture.

There is no recruitment embargo or ban in the HSE. There are between 10,000 and 15,000 more people working in the HSE now than there were two or three years ago. There has been a constant increase in the number of staff in the HSE in the last couple of years. HSE managers are no longer allowed to take on staff without the money to pay them, which is a practice that occurred in the health service. This does not happen in the education sector or the Garda, but it was common practice in the health service for a number of years for managers to take on staff without the budget to pay them. That became the overrun we often talk about at the end of the year. The new CEO has brought in more controls in that regard. Those controls, which stipulate that managers can only take on staff if they have the budget to pay them, would be considered normal practice in any other part of the public service.

As I mentioned earlier, we now have more staff in the health services than previously. There are 600 more nurses working in our public health service than this time last year, and there more doctors than ever before. We now have 11,000 beds in our public health service. During the Celtic tiger period, a policy decision was taken by the Government of the day to take thousands of beds out of our hospital system. That was a mistake. In 2014, we reversed that policy as soon as we had the money to do so. We have been adding hospital beds ever since, but clearly we need to do more.

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