Ms Laura Magahy:

Part of this is trying to stop people coming into a hospital when they should not be in the hospital. Nobody wants to be in hospital if they do not need to be there, and we need to start providing alternative pathways. We need to look at other professions and what they can do. We need to look at what pharmacists could do. We need to provide alternative treatment paths and not have everybody coming into the emergency departments. That is part of it. Then, as we said, there are very good initiatives happening but we need to scale them. People are coming into emergency departments and being met by FIT teams, brought to other locations and treated in a better and much more humane way. Things are happening in pockets around the system but we must scale them, standardise them and roll them out.