Mr. John Pollock:

The business services team was the first appointment made in 2008. It is a consortium of four companies. PM Group was one of the companies involved. It provided design expertise and took responsibility for doing the feasibility design up front, before the O'Connell Mahon Architects team was appointed later. PM Group was responsible for managing the budget. It was also responsible for managing the schedules, in terms of coming up with the schedule we were working to and what the budget is. It was €650 million in the case of the Mater hospital site.

There was the legal team and Beauchamps Solicitors, which are part of the PM Group legal team, providing legal advice and procurement advice as regards how the development board would procure the project management services team and the design team.

The next big inputs were around the health planning role, which was the health planners. That involved coming up with the design brief for the Mater hospital, looking at the resourcing plan for the current existing hospital, the future hospitals, the savings that would be made, what type of work practices would be put in place in the hospital and what model of care this hospital would work under as it was a different model of care from the model of care the three children's hospitals are currently working on. For example, to come up with the design brief that group attended 1,200 meetings with the user groups, such as the nurses, doctors, consultants, outpatient departments, emergency departments, theatres, ward sisters and so forth to understand exactly how they currently functioned. The 1,200 meetings was a huge volume of work.

The fourth member was BDO which was producing the business case. Having worked up the capital costs, one must show that there is a return to the State on its investment. This is linked to the workforce planning. How many people are in the hospital and what salaries will they be paid, currently and in the future? What is the head count in the hospital and will savings be generated in that regard? As I mentioned previously, there is buying the consumables, medicines, linen, the food, catering and everything that goes into the hospital, assessing where one is currently and where one can go in the future.