Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

On the second issue, I will need to take a look and revert to the Deputy, so I will respond just to the first one now. I hope she will have seen in the budget a serious commitment to Sláintecare. There are many different factors, one of which is capacity. We just need more of everything and there is a big commitment in that regard. The second is configuration, so there will be a large investment in community, home care and so forth. The third goes to the heart of the Deputy's question and relates to organisation. Critically for me, it is about joining up the budgets and centring everything around the patient, so that it is not a matter of community or acute, or of whether someone is in one CHO but a different hospital group or a different public health group. Those groups have their own targets too.

A great deal of progress is being made across the board. Specifically on the organisational aspect, it is a question of timing. In a previous life, I was involved in some large reorganisations. The international evidence shows that complex reorganisations fail most of the time and the majority of them destroy value, for a bunch of reasons. They are really complicated and tend to be done in peacetime. Something I observed in that previous life is that when someone says a large reorganisation will commence, everyone starts focusing on the reorganisation because they are thinking about their jobs and what will happen to them. I do not know if I am correct, but my view is that while we need to do the planning for it, the middle of Covid is not the right time to press the trigger on it. We need to keep the system focused on Covid and the resumption of services. Laura McGahey and I have discussed it at some length, and as the Deputy will be aware, she is a very strong advocate for this. If it is the right step to take and a call is made to pause formal reorganisation for now and to let everyone focus just on the healthcare system, can we in the meantime start rewiring budgetary lines and start doing the technical joining-up while telling everyone not to worry about what it might look like in a month's or a year's time? We should tell them to do their jobs and to get great healthcare results for patients, but let us start doing some of the joining-up of budgets and so on in the background. That is my thinking on the matter at the moment.