Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

This is the point. We know the RCSI hospitals group can reduce waiting lists not by any one hospital or consultant owning the waiting list or the patients on the waiting list but by utilising the small level 2 and level 3 hospitals that work. These are the conversations I am having with the HSE. The Sláintecare report refers clearly to this. I was going to make this point to the Chairman. He has spoken about arriving at a point where the unscheduled care demand becomes so great that we do not have the capacity in our health service to deal with the elective work. I have spoken about this publicly. I believe each of our hospital groups need to look at the idea of elective-only centres. The private hospital sector is doing this already. The new deputy director general of the HSE is John Connaghan. He was working in National Health Service Scotland. Let us consider what they did in the Scottish NHS. The public health service there bought up a hospital in Glasgow and used it as an elective-only centre. This drove down the waiting lists because it decoupled trolleys from the waiting lists. I will be looking at that in the context of all the various discussions with budgets and capital plans that we are engaged in now.

I am conscious that there are many questions and I have no wish to delay too much.