Mr. John Swords:

Our progress in making savings has been very steady. Since 2010 we have saved €260 million in cash. Our savings target for the year was €30 million, which we have achieved at this point, as expected. However, one can only take out a certain amount before value disappears and the quality of service decreases. We must be very careful to strike a balance. During the austerity programme, pressure was put on us to create cash that could be put back into patient care and we did our job. In the future we will rationalise services and bring much more into procurement and compliance in contracting. One of the areas where we see it happening is the development of services through the National Distribution Centre based in Tullamore. This will standardise our stockholding arrangements and approach and give more options for small to medium enterprises. In the event of their not having the logistics to deal with the whole country, we can do it for them.