Mr. Liam Woods:

On the bed designations, the legislation changed in the last number of years. There used to be a situation where there was a particular number of named beds, which I think the Chairman was referring to. In any hospital, there might be 100 beds of a specific designation which are identified as private beds and if private patients are in them, the hospital can charge. The law changed in the last three years to a situation where patients who are admitted and elect to be treated privately can be charged. What Ms Cowan has referred to as an assistance to the insurers to understand that a patient was treated in a bed or in a treatment location - it is not all bed based - is a bed database which is maintained as part of an MOU of them. The control is actually in the Act. That has seen a significant growth in income because there were always patients presenting who were private, who would have elected to go private and could not be charged. Over the last few years that has been amended.

There was a question on the managed equipment, perhaps Ms Eilísh Hardiman will talk more about it on the children's hospital side in the next session. The managed equipment service idea which is prevalent in health internationally would look at two life cycles of a set of equipment and entering into lease-type arrangements with specialist organisations. The Deputy named one or two of them. That is being explored within the HSE because there is a real challenge around maintaining the equipment base where we need it to be. We are doing that.

The HIPE data set records all diagnoses across all hospitals. Every one of the 1.6 million cases is coded so there is good information available nationally on diagnoses.