Professor Alan Irvine:

I appreciate this is to do with the review of the private hospital deal. There are certainly many learnings we can take from this but we should not be focused entirely on what we will do with the next private hospital deal. We have massive restrictions in capacity. We need to be bold, imaginative and local. We need to look at where good local solutions have worked and how we can get extra capacity for outpatient and inpatient procedures in the public sector also.

That has to be an absolute priority rather than seeing how we can do things better in a narrow way with the independent sector. That might be important in the short term, but let us also be bold and imaginative. We are in a special place-----