Mr. Patrick Lynch:

No, it will be a single person who will call people back. The HSE issued an apology on Saturday and on Monday morning, where there were technical difficulties with the volume of calls and there were definitely long waiting times for people, and people had to call multiple times. My understanding from assurances that have been given to the serious incident management team, SIMT, today is that has improved. We were then concerned by the length of time it was taking to return calls to women; one does not want to phone on a given day and feel that one has to wait a week for a call back. We have been given assurances this morning, as I have already mentioned, that all of those elements have been put in place. I would be surprised and disappointed if we find tomorrow, when we look at the statistics, that things have not improved significantly today.

That is in addition to the wider communication through the clinical community, through GPs and the Irish Nurses and Widwives Organisation, who have also been very supportive and want to ensure that the confidence in this programme is not lost. There has been a general goodwill by everybody to get this fixed and make sure that we respond appropriately.