Ms Laverne McGuinness:

As the Minister has indicated, the HIQA review will be carried out earlier. With regard to the level of investment, the €25 million was put in place to improve response times in the ambulance service. There are a number of components to this, one of which is a national control centre. There is to be a control centre, over two sites, that will be able to monitor every single ambulance so the ambulance nearest the scene can be dispatched. The system will be able to determine where other ambulances are available. That will be in place by 2015. As the Deputy will know, a number of centres have already moved to the single site in Townsend Street, which will be monitored in future from Tallaght. The centre in Navan has moved there. Those in Tralee and Cork moved in 2013, and others are to go on stream this year.

Let me refer to the other important piece of infrastructure that is being put in place. It was mentioned by Deputy Ó Caoláin in relation to ICT infrastructure and the geomapping and directory system. All radio controls are now being upgraded to digital instead of analogue. There was an investment of €7 million in ICT infrastructure, and this is important.

The other significant investment was to put in place intermediate care vehicles. Twenty-five of those new vehicles were put in place in the second half of last year. Rather than using an ambulance to transport patients from one hospital to another for inter-hospital transfers, we will be using the intermediate care vehicles with a view to freeing up ambulances so they can get to a scene quicker and on time.

The improvements are not as we want them to be. We set a target response time in 2013 of 70%. We have delivered on that and we have set a target this year of 80%. In some regions, we have been hitting a figure of 78%. Therefore, we have been moving beyond the targets in those particular areas.

It is important to note that while we are trying to improve the response times, there are approximately 334,000 calls to be answered every year. I refer in particular to the high-category calls, which we call the delta and echo calls. In these blue light categories, we are responding to an extra 1,000 calls per month. This, in turn, can affect response times.

One of the key areas to be addressed is the turnaround time of the emergency departments. It is a question of how quickly an ambulance gets back from the emergency department. We have set a target of 20 minutes. That is not always achieved, so that is being addressed as part of an action plan that is currently in place.