Mr. Paul Reid:

Yes. The Deputy made very helpful suggestions in regard to the primary care reimbursement service, PCRS, and savings in regard to biosimilars. I spent an afternoon last week in our PCRS centre on the northside in Finglas. It is an excellent centre and is as good as many centres I have seen operating in the private sector. It is staffed entirely by HSE staff and they certainly have some excellent data in terms of the use of biosimilars, and they are capturing better data as they go along. The Deputy raised the issue about policy change but we can certainly see the variance in the use of it around the consultants and across all the different hospitals. We can see an opportunity in that regard and, as the Deputy said, it is part of our savings measures, given there are some areas we have to deliver on this year. The Deputy also mentioned the reimbursement process overall.

On the issue of using skills across the groups, I agree with the Deputy that it is a question of how best to use them within the group in regard to deployment, and the nurses agreement certainly facilitates and supports that further. That is simply a good use of resources across the group.

On the recruitment issue, we are looking at dealing with clogs in the system. As I have mentioned, there is certainly a lot of recruitment going on. Sometimes it can be done directly through the Public Appointments Service, which is dealing with a significant number of sectors and pressures on recruitment. We are happy to look through that and get back to the Deputy in regard to any logjams we see in the system overall.

Dr. Henry might want to comment on ophthalmology and care.