Mr. Tony O'Brien:

Recently, for the first time, we have had a consolidated figure for the number of persons waiting for an outpatient appointment. That overall figure is being subjected to validation. In other words, we would expect to find within that total persons who have already had their first appointment at another location or who have perhaps moved location. There is likely to be significant duplication within that, so the process of validation will have a significant impact. One of the reasons for putting the time and energy into developing a single consolidated view was to facilitate that type of process. That then allows us to put in a primary target list to enable chronological provision of appointments, subject to clinical need, and to take that forward. In context, each month approximately 160,000 outpatient appointments arise in our system. That would be a mix of first and follow-up appointments.