Mr. Jim Breslin:

We have to unravel two things that happened right at the same time. The underlying cause was the same but they were two completely separate things. Because of that exponential growth, NPHET took the public health advice that it would advise all non-essential healthcare services to pause. That included private healthcare. Public and private non-essential health services should pause. That was on 27 March and, on 30 March, the deal with the private hospitals was completed. NPHET made that decision for two reasons. The first was to ensure that we had space for the surge when it came but the second was in recognition that the spread of the virus within the community was such that there was a risk that bringing people in for non-essential healthcare would further spread the virus. Both public and private hospitals experienced that over the course of April. I mentioned in my opening statement that there were 2,000 beds vacant in public hospitals at one point, which is unprecedented. Undoubtedly, and there will be lessons to be learned for the next arrangement we enter into, there were complications in operationalising this arrangement. With 18 different hospital groups and more than 500 self-employed hospital consultants, there are many lessons to be learned but the biggest factor in the utilisation during the course of April and into the early part of May was that NPHET had not lifted the pause on non-essential healthcare during that period, which meant a lesser uptake of healthcare. In fact, when we surveyed the public during that period, 28% of people said that they delayed accessing healthcare during that period. We do not like that. We have tried to get the message across that they should seek healthcare but the public were naturally anxious about it, and both the public and private systems experienced that anxiety.