Ms Michele Monahan:

I am a radiography manager so I deal with capacity issues every day. What will happen, as Ms Ní Sheaghda said, is that we will have two pathways. However, we have reopened emergency departments, EDs, which are now at the capacity they were pre-Covid. Pre-Covid we had TrolleyGAR, trolley watch, trolley everything, except one is not allowed to have that any more. What it puts back on the staff is that they work two streams whereby sometimes Covid-19 and non-Covid-19 patients are put through one piece of equipment - one CT scanner one MRI scanner - as fast as possible so no-one is waiting on a trolley and patients are admitted quickly so there is no crossover between Covid-19 and non-Covid-19.

We are not nearly at burnout, we are at burnout. One had to be there and to work through it. As Ms Murphy will attest, nobody can get what one had to go through except to be there. The first thing one learns as a healthcare professional is to leave emotions at the door and do not take patients home with us, but we did. We took every Covid-19 patient home with us because no family members were allowed in to see them. The burnout, stress and fatigue for those who did not get Covid-19 but had to do double shifts, additional call and additional everything needs to be recognised and a response needs to be put in. In one word, what we need to meet the capacity is "More". We need more staff, more equipment, more space and more everything as otherwise, it is not going to work.