Dr. Matthew Sadlier:

The answer to the Deputy's question is that we must ask ourselves why we needed to do this. Why, in a public hospital system, did we need to look for extra capacity in the private system? It is because we have had so many years of under investment into the public hospital system. We talk about beds in the public hospital system but there are other things we could have done that would have helped and facilitated the move to the private hospitals.

We cannot let today's meeting finish without making sure that three things are clearly stated. First, is the investment that we urgently require in the IT systems within the hospitals. Within mental health, where I work, we have been asked to move to telemedicine, but that is not possible unless one has computers with cameras and microphones, which almost none of the primary care centres and mental health teams is facilitated with.

Second, the private hospital spread around the country does not reflect the geographical spread of the population. There was, and still is, a possibility with some of the money that was being spent on this deal to introduce generational changes, whether it is through modular builds or temporary builds to expand bed capacity in areas of the country where due to population spread there is no private hospital alternative.

Third, we cannot under any circumstances leave today without emphasising the damage that the 30% cut to consultants' salaries in 2012 has done to the recruitment and retention of specialist staff within the public healthcare service. We can talk about capacity in terms of beds and buildings as much as we like, but if we do not have the specialists within those buildings to provide the care for the patients the buildings are fundamentally useless. Ultimately, what is going to happen in the coming months is that there will be an unprecedented demand for medical expertise across the world. Within the English-speaking medical world we have always been the country that has paid the least and has been the least competitive in terms of being able to recruit specialist staff. If we do not address the 30% cut urgently, we could be in a far worse place when the autumn and winter comes. As my colleague Dr. O'Connor said, we will have an apocalyptic situation if we get hit with flu and Covid at the same time.