Mr. Liam Woods:

The Deputy is right in saying that there is work going on in terms of a roadmap to recommence what were described as non-essential services, which are being resumed right now. In the public system there is a resumption of some activity. We have seen a significant fall-off in elective activity both by way of the decisions we have already spoken about and the public attitude to attending healthcare facilities. What we are resuming now is surgery such as orthopaedics. Rapid access cancer services continue to run and we are looking to grow the volumes through those. We have directly gone after growing the number of cardiology and stroke attendances because we have seen concern around that. General surgery, to the extent that we can resume it, is resuming. It is important to note, and it was referenced in dialogue, that the capacity to do work within the current environment is more restricted than it was before we had Covid, so our throughput capacities will be limited.

In terms of the private system, as referred to by the Deputy, the National Treatment Purchase Fund, NTPF, obviously has cases identified for priority treatment, and they can be and have been targeted through the private system. The private system is already doing cancer work for the public services. We had moved cancer work from the Mater Hospital and St. Vincent's University Hospital in Dublin. In Tralee, there is a joint roster working around key areas of provision in areas such as general respiratory care and rheumatology. We would anticipate that the caseload within the private system for surgery will also grow in the coming month contingent on what happens to the figures around the trend in the pandemic. The key point to get across is that the challenge of operating in both environments is very different from what it was if we go back three to four months.