Professor Aiden McCormick:

There is a difference between an accountant's approach to this and a clinician's approach. Our approach is to treat everybody we can who is in the clinic. That is what we told the institutions. By the end of this year, 1,700 will have been treated. Hopefully it will be more but it will probably be 1,700. There are approximately 1,000 on the books in the hospital. We are probably going to treat 1,800 to 2,500 next year. If they are not around we have to go out and find them. There is no point in us setting a target of 300 for Beaumont Hospital when it only has 200 patients. Our approach has been to treat as many as we can as quickly as we can and to get to the end. Certainly, we can put targets there, but they will be wrong. Is that a useful thing to do? Clinicians just want to eradicate this as quickly as we can. With a bit of luck, the tools the Department has given us and the fact that we are now implementing Sláintecare where we are moving treatment out of the hospitals into the community I believe we will eradicate this before 2026.