Mr. Martin Varley:

For two very significant reasons, we will see higher waiting lists. First and foremost, the impact of providing care to Covid-infected patients has changed the situation in hospitals, and we saw the drop-off we have referred to in both public and private. That will give rise to very significant increases in the public waiting lists, but in addition, we now have hidden waiting lists in private hospital settings that we would never have had before. Some of them are urgent non-Covid cases, such as cardiac cases, oncology cases and ophthalmic cases - the list goes on. We have not been flexible, agile or innovative enough in dealing with this agreement to allow us to treat more patients. We have seen a great deal of flexibility coming from consultants throughout our acute hospitals to cater with the surge and everything that has given rise to, but we have not seen flexibility in terms of this contract.

We wrote to the Minister, having dialogued with the officials over a lengthy period, suggesting there were ways to introduce a more practical, flexible contract arrangement that would have optimised the use of the private hospitals' capacity and of the outpatient clinics, which were effectively shut. Consultants in private practices had a Hobson's choice. They either signed a type A contract that stated everything had to be public, which meant they could not feasibly maintain their outpatient clinic for thousands of patients-----