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

I can assure the Deputy I will still be Taoiseach next week.

Deputy Mattie McGrath does not need to say any sayonaras just yet.

The contract for the private hospitals ends at the end of June, so it is really only a couple of weeks now. The HSE is now trying to negotiate a new arrangement with the private hospitals to allow them to step in if, for some reason, we need the beds at a later stage and also to use the National Treatment Purchase Fund, NTPF, to get some necessary work done for public patients.

Regarding the Be On Call For Ireland campaign, a large number of people expressed an interest. Quite a large number were not suitably qualified. Quite a large number already worked in health and social care, for example, in nursing homes. Rather than moving them to hospitals we wanted to keep them in the nursing homes for reasons people will understand. What also happened there as well is that a lot of people were recruited locally anyway, rather than going through the HSE central system, which can be quite cumbersome. At local hospital and community level, managers were empowered to recruit locally and in a lot of cases that is how it was done instead of through the central system.

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