Jack Chambers (Dublin West, Fianna Fail)

One of the main areas of focus for the new Minister for Health has been the need to address work time during the evenings and over weekends. The Minister has been proactive in managing that over the past number of weeks, in particular, to ensure we have a greater presence of senior consultants and others across the hospital system in order to try to accelerate discharge and provide senior oversight in the clinical environment over the weekend period. We are seeing the positive outworking of that in the ongoing management and work between the Minister for Health and the HSE.

With regard to the pay and numbers strategy, a significant increase in the health budget was agreed last July between the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, and the then Minister, Stephen Donnelly, which gave multiannual two-year certainty to the HSE to manage its overall pay and numbers in the context of a two-year framework. That was welcomed at the time by the HSE and the hospitals within it, in particular tertiary hospitals and others, so that they could accelerate recruitment over that window of time. That has provided a benefit to the HSE in terms of managing increased clinical workload.

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