Mr. John King:

I will be brief and avoid repetition if I can. I briefly mentioned earlier that society and the health system waited for the crisis to arrive before reacting. We are now in a position where we do not have to allow that to happen again. To give a very broad answer, it is a matter of our readiness to deal with a second surge when it comes. It is about ensuring that the health service has the capacity and the resources to meet that challenge when it comes. That includes issues such as that of PPE and proper policies and procedures that do not act as disincentives. There must be clear decision-making authority and so on. The point about the role of the Health and Safety Authority has been made so I will not repeat it.

One of the issues with regard to resourcing is that of staffing. This includes safe levels of staffing in all areas. Our submission highlights one matter with a view to highlighting it specifically rather than the story because we must learn from the story. It is then about applying what we have learned.

We have thousands of workers who come into health service settings every day of the week to do essential jobs to support the safe delivery of health services. They are not public servants and they do not have the same protections and terms and conditions of employment, such as the likes of death in service benefit, health and safety entitlements and so on. We believe that also needs to be examined if we are talking about a safe delivery of the health system in the future.