Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Progress is being made. The representative body has been engaging through last year. As I said, they met in February and in March. They are back into the WRC. The pay anomaly has been addressed in regard to the laboratory aids. Good progress is being made to that effect. The workforce has gone up since before the pandemic. It increased by about 7% since pre-pandemic levels which is very positive. I fully agree that we need more medical scientists working in our labs and in our hospitals. My view is we need to double the number of healthcare college places including these. The Minister, Deputy Harris, and I are working to put a very ambitious plan in place to do this. As the Deputy will be aware we recently, just in the last few weeks, appointed a chief health and social care professional officer in the Department of Health. That has been warmly welcomed for example at the Forsa conference in Galway two weeks ago. She is going to be working on exactly these kinds of issues to make sure that we are listening to and respecting these workers and making sure that they can work to the greatest extent of their training and licence.

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