Ms Anne O'Connor:

Our mental health and disability settings are regulated by external regulators. We are working closely with HIQA with respect to nursing homes and disability settings. The Mental Health Commission is also working with us on disability settings. Our services have been provided with advice. The staff in mental health settings, which are mostly HSE-provided, are involved in developing their own approaches to this with the guidance of public health information and the local area crisis management team. Likewise, the disability sector has availed of all advice and guidance.

On infection prevention and control, in the disability sector, most testing has been done by staff working in the sector rather than by external testing teams, and we will expand that. It is taking this as seriously as possible and doing everything that it can. Its first interest is service users and it is committed, across all of our services, to ensuring that we can continue to provide services that are safe and that do no harm to any service user.