Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

No. I do not think so. If we go back to when the report was published and when the implementation plan was published – I do not have the latter in front of me – if we were to pull that out and look at the Gantt charts and what was meant to happen by when, I imagine we would find that Sláintecare is behind in an awful lot of areas. If there is any silver lining within the health service from Covid, it is that a lot of Sláintecare initiatives and thinking, in particular around innovation, community-based care and one of the most important areas to me, which is linking up the care pathway for patients and designing it all around the patient, is happening at a level it has not happened before. For example, I was in St. Vincent’s University Hospital the other day, with the emergency medicine team, and by following through on the Sláintecare principles and by providing the funding in the winter plan, there was nobody on a trolley. The people who were in the emergency department were in their own rooms. The emergency medicine consultants said to me that they had not seen that in many years. One of them said he had just given up on there ever being a solution. What is interesting is that people are still coming to the emergency department. Admissions are still at 90% of last year, and people are still being admitted to hospital. Admissions are still at approximately 90% of the figure for last year, but the number of people waiting on trolleys is at approximately 30% of the figure for last year, and it is because of the Sláintecare philosophy on patient flow. One of the things we have done is put funding in the winter plan into home care, which means the delayed transfers of care happen. Deputy Durkan was a member of the relevant committee. The flow is beginning to happen. We are seeing it.