Dr. Eamonn Rogers:

I totally agree. Cancer has to get the optimal care in the right location but we can move certain services that are non-cancer into the community. The national clinical programme in surgery has started looking at this with its models of care, looking at benign conditions that can be managed in the community with shared care initiatives, with general practitioners using nurse-led clinics in the community. These initiatives have actually started and are being piloted at the moment in my own health region. To make this work it involves moving traditional work that comes into hospital which clogs the outpatients. The idea is to reduce footfall in hospitals, which is more important now with Covid-19 risk, and to move this work as much as possible into the community, closer to home. These initiatives are live and also depend, as Mr. Woods said, on getting diagnostics in primary care centres.