Ms Anne O'Connor:

The group is responsible for managing the oversight of beds within acute hospitals. At national level, we look at all of the beds in order that we know how many beds are closed or blocked daily, primarily due to infection. We know that yesterday, across the national system, 111 beds were closed. We also look at the daily availability of beds in community settings. The approach through winter is a key focus for us, to make sure that people are stepping out of the acute settings altogether and moving into relevant step-down facilities and transitional care. At this time, nobody is waiting for transitional care approval. We are trying to match patients from acute settings to community settings and to ensure that people who are ready to move can move.

On Deputy Brassil's question about delayed transfer of care, we are doing a great deal of work on that. Last year, the Minister of State, Deputy Daly, commissioned an independent review on delayed transfers of care. We have been looking at how we record people who are ready to leave acute settings, etc. Since we started to implement our winter initiative in September, one of the key measures that we have looked at is bed days lost. We will always have people in beds but how long they are there for is our challenge. We have reduced the bed days lost by 20% since September on foot of the initiatives we have put in place. We are proactively trying every day to move people who have been waiting the longest from acute hospitals into more appropriate settings.