Mr. Tony O'Brien:

The rationale that informed the original decision may not be the same as the rationale I will put forward now. I need to own that fact because I was not the person who made those decisions. Let us look at the example of the mid-west, where we have a hospital group and a community health organisation whose boundaries are coterminous. We do not have the complicating factor of boundaries. That previously was an integrated service area. If they were present, the people who now work in that area, one running the hospital group and the other running the community health organisation, would tell the committee that both sets of services are running more effectively under separate management, albeit with coterminous boundaries than used to be the case when they were a single organisation.