Mr. Jim Breslin:

More than 280 consultants have signed up. In the event that they do not sign up, arrangements are in place with the patient to decide if he or she wants to stay with that private hospital consultant. The patient might stay with him or her in his or her outpatient rooms, if that is the type of care the patient is receiving, or the patient may wish to move across. If patient moves across, he or she moves either to another private hospital consultant who has signed up, or to a consultant assigned from within the public system.

I refer to the point about how much activity that there can be in this period. We are organising and re-organising all of the activity, so many things that were happening in public hospitals have now moved lock, stock, and barrel into private hospitals. We want to keep it away from an area that might have Covid, and run it in the private hospital, and run it in a facility that is purpose-built for that. The private hospital facility makes an important contribution to how we meet healthcare needs at this stage. What we will have to review is the extent to which we continue with that. The point that I wish to make, and I made it earlier, is that the mandate that we started from was not to have a dual system of public funds going into a private hospital and then fee income coming in at the same time. We may change that, but the question that presents in that situation is whether there are different incentives for treating private patients in that situation.