Ms Laverne McGuinness:

I will deal with Deputy Byrne's question on Hollybrook and the CNU. She is correct; it has taken a period of time to open it. We hope it will be open in six months. The reason it has taken time is because there is a question about whether the service will delivered by the HSE staff, which would require new staff, or through a public-private partnership initiative. Our plan is that it is done through a public private partnership initiative.

A specification is currently being concluded and we hope that will happen within a four week period. Under the public service agreement we also have to engage in an extensive consultation process with unions. That will be concluded in the next six to eight weeks. Thereafter, we hope to open the unit within six months. The specification has to be done because is very important to define what type of residents and patients will be treated in the unit, whether they will be complex, etc. It will take six months for us to complete a HIQA inspection process and have the unit fitted out.

Deputy Byrne also raised the issue of critical care and the importance of critical care beds. This year, working with the clinical lead, Dr. Michael Power, we have identified the areas of greatest priority. St. James's Hospital requires four critical care beds, Tallaght Hospital requires three and Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital requires one, a total of eight. St. James's Hospital has received funding of €900,000 on a full-year basis and will open the critical care beds in June because it needs to recruit 11 staff, two of whom will be involved in intensive care. I understand there was a lag of one week for cancelled operative procedures and those patients have been dealt with within that timeframe.

With regard to the ambulance service and non-emergency and non-urgent transport, it is correct to say that in order to improve response times and ensure that our ambulance fleet can get to emergency situations within our target of 18 minutes 59 seconds, we are very considered in terms of to what we will respond. That is why we use intermediate care vehicles to transfer patients from one hospital to another. We ask people at home to travel with relatives or ask somebody to bring them to hospital rather than engage in the traditional use of ambulance services.