Ms. Laura Magahy:

I acknowledge what Deputy Donnelly is saying and absolutely recognise the need to provide resources, particularly the community. I will come back to access in hospitals shortly. This is why it was so important that the thousand therapists are being funded. Prioritising the allocation of them to address community waiting lists, staffing of primary care centres and keeping people out of hospital is critical. This is what we will be working through with Dean over the next couple of weeks. The Deputy is absolutely right that Sláintecare is all about moving care to the place of least complexity, trying to prevent things happening in the first place and resourcing of the community. Our one mantra in the programme and implementation office was always "Let us resource the community properly and do it in an organised way". Patients will see the benefits of that next year. Will everybody see the benefits immediately? Probably not. Will there be a start? Yes, there will. That is the priority from our perspective.

The integration fund also has a large number of projects that address issues the Deputy has raised around mental health and older people. Many of these are not simply pilots, many of them are scaling initiatives that have already been working properly but which needed resourcing and scaling.

Our goal is to get immediate, short-term improvements. That is what will be put in place through next year.