Mr. Nicholas Jermyn:

I must stress that we are a single legal entity. We have a private hospital and a public hospital on our campus. The governance structure of the board allows me to control and manage that. I emphasise that when St. Vincent's University Hospital opened in 1972, it had no private beds. That was the model. The private hospital opened in 1974. As a result of what happened in later years, we now have between 45 and 55 private beds in the public hospital. Since 1974, we have operated a model whereby private patients are treated when clinically appropriate in the private hospital. We actually max out. We do very well with private income in the public hospital. The difficulty is that we always used a model whereby private patients who could afford it were put into the private hospital, thereby leaving the public beds available for public patients. Our model has been operating since 1974. It might be affected in the event of the development of a system of universal health insurance. I know people will say there is a conflict, but I can say quite confidently that I see no conflict. There is a compliance issue for us under the consultants' common contract - we have to ensure consultants practice at a certain level across the private and public systems. I have full sight of what is going on in the private and public hospitals.