Professor Steve Thomas:

The answer to both questions are the quick wins in the system. These have been deliberately built into Sláintecare, which is one of the nice aspects of it. There are wins we can have without a system change that will just make a difference to people's lives, such as lowering prescription charges, removing hospital inpatient charges and lowering the drug reimbursement threshold per single headed households. These are all overnight wins we can achieve for which we do not need a system response and, therefore, do not need to wait for the system to change.

We do not need to wait for the system to get better before we legislate because there are components we can do now and get into play now. There are components that have a slower build. We need to develop a universal primary and community care setting, which is a key issue. Having quick wins builds trust with the public and investing in the right areas in primary and community care will, hopefully, build trust among providers in the system because they can see where it needs to go, and that we are far too acute focused and we need to have much better non-acute settings. As we talked about earlier, if we put human resources into this setting and make sure we can make good on some of our commitments, people will start to see a system that is changing and that they can buy into, and this is when it will start to build motivation and morale.