Mr. Paul Reid:

I will try to be brief. On the first question, the reason that I communicated with the Secretary General on communications and capacity specifically related to the agreement that we had all been working to and have recently delivered, namely a pathway that gets us to 100,000 tests to be completed within a week. Specifically, the engagement that I had over that weekend related to communications where that was announced as we were still in dialogue about our pathway to get there. That was the nature of the engagement and communications that I had, and members will have seen the letter which is publicly available. There will be many different engagements between myself and the Secretary General on a range of issues, but I felt that we needed to clarify this one. Subsequently, as members will be aware, we have engaged significantly and collaboratively on the change management plan that I launched last Thursday,14 May, which is the outcome of those discussions over the past few weeks. The issue was never about how we could get to the capacity for 100,000. The issue was our pathway and the process that we were engaged in to get there, and which we did finish out on. Thankfully, we have a good and agreed shared plan. That specifically is what I wrote about at that stage.

The second question was on whether other services will be impacted by testing and tracing. It is the very nature of what we are going to have to live with, definitely for the next year ahead but who knows, it may be longer. I cannot predict, but we are going to have to have the capacity for the testing and tracing process, while at the same time, as other Deputies have also asked, migrating back to non-Covid services. Unfortunately, it cannot be an either-or scenario for us. We cannot turn the dial down on one, because much of our workforce are workers that we have in the healthcare system engaged in swabbing centres, for example. It is an extra demand on us, but we will have to meet that demand while migrating back to a level of safe non-Covid services.

In terms of the non-Covid deaths, before I finish I will ask Dr. Colm Henry to come in because that is an issue that NPHET is looking through in order to assess the non-Covid deaths that have happened. Are these incremental or is it different? That is a process that the data is still being compiled on.

The provisional supports for healthcare workers is something that I am hugely committed to. We have put in a range of supports during this period which have, thankfully, been well taken up by our support workers. That can be in terms of support helplines, engagement sessions that they have, collectively or individually, through our employee assistance programme, or dedicated mental health and stress lines that we have put in place for our staff that have been significantly taken up. We are happy to share with members some numbers on that take-up. Who knows about after it, but certainly throughout this crisis I want to maintain and provide the wide range of supports for our staff that they quite rightly deserve.

In terms of concerns regarding non-reporting of symptoms, this week we launched a public media campaign on national and local radio to strongly encourage people to come back for care where they have symptoms that they believe need clinical care, whether that is back through our GP, hospital or community systems. What we want to do in that process is-----