Charles Flanagan
Question:58 Mr. Flanagan asked the Minister for Health and Children the numbers of doctors and nurses he forecasts the State will need for the next decade; and whether plans are in place to meet these requirements. [5836/02]
Written Answers. - Health Action Plan.
I have initiated a number of measures to estimate the number of doctors and nurses required by the State over the next decade and beyond. In relation to the numbers of hospital doctors the Deputy will be aware that the Government has approved the establishment of a national task force on medical staffing.
The task force will, among other issues, consider the proposed development of a consultant delivered public hospital service and quantify the resource and cost implications involved. The task force will also address the reduction in working hours for non-consultant hospital doctors arising from the EU Directive on Working Time and the medical education and training requirements of our hospital medical workforce. The task force's recommendations will have implications for the number of hospital doctors, both consultants and NCHDs, required in the public hospital service. The first meeting of the task force will take place on 21 February 2002.
In relation to the number of doctors in general practice, the primary care strategy – Primary Care, A New Direction – which was published as part of the health strategy Quality and Fairness – A Health System for You, states that a needs assessment of the composition and number of primary care teams in each health board area will be carried out within guidelines and frameworks developed by the forthcoming national primary care task force.
A primary care human resources plan will be produced by the national primary care task force and the health boards to develop the capacity of primary care. Immediate improvements in human resource planning as proposed in chapter 5 of the main health strategy document will be accelerated to enable projected longer term requirements for staff numbers and skills mix to be identified, particularly in the health and social care professions.
The human resources plan will require the commitment and support of various professional providers and other staff involved in order to ensure that its successful development and implementation is progressed on a partnership basis. It will be based on the needs assessments to be carried out by individual health boards.
With regard to ensuring an adequate supply of nurses and midwives to staff our health service into the future, the Commission on Nursing identified a need to strengthen the workforce planning functions in my Department. In response, my Department set up a study of the nursing and midwifery resource in December 1998. The aim of the project is to analyse the present position with regard to the nursing and midwifery workforce, to devise a system for the projection of future needs and to plan how these needs may be met. A steering group chaired by my Department's chief nursing officer is overseeing the project. The steering group's final report is due to be published in April 2002.
The steering group published an interim report in September 2000, and the €6.35 million, £5 million, recruitment/retention initiative announced by me on 29 November 2000 was my immediate response to recommendations contained in the report. The steering group has identified as an urgent priority the refinement of systems and processes used to supply essential information to ensure that forecasts for future nursing and midwifery requirement are feasible and improve over time. Highlighted in the interim report are the inadequacies of existing databases to yield reliable information on which to base forecasts. To address this, work is progressing on the development of a new personnel, payroll, attendance and recruitment system, PPARS, that will capture essential data on each individual and post within the health service. The PPARS project is a fundamental building block in developing dependable, reliable and robust quality information to forecast human resource requirements for the health service in the future.
Increasing the annual intakes of nursing students is a central component of my overall strategy for addressing the nursing shortage in the medium to long-term. In 2000 there was a 25% increase in the number of nurse training places, from 1,200 to 1,500. The number of training places will rise to 1,640 in 2002. Over the lifetime of the national health strategy, quality and fairness, 10,000 nurses will be trained.