Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Tuesday, 19 May 2020
Special Committee on Covid-19 Response
Briefing by Department of Health Officials
Mr. Jim Breslin:
We have to go back in time as regards the private hospitals. As we moved towards the end of March, we were beginning to experience some of what we had seen in Italy and France, and based on the trajectory of admissions into ICUs in public hospitals, they were going to rapidly fill up. We would have exceeded our ICU capacity within a week. That was the focus of the arrangement we put in place. We needed immediate access to those facilities. We will obviously review that as we go forward, but as I said earlier, we could find ourselves back in that situation quite readily. The other thing I should stress is that during that period, non-Covid care fell off across all healthcare services and sectors, in both public and private hospitals. We saw it in emergency departments-----
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