Ms Angela Fitzgerald:

Mr. Woods made the point about the plan in terms of the growth in activity. For context, in the bed capacity review, it brings us to where we should be by the end of this year. As we know, and the Deputy made the point well, that capacity will not give us as much as it would have before. In our plan this year, we are recognising that we will not get the same yield in our activity both in theatre and in social distance requirements. We have three plans: one, to grow capacity; two, to leverage the National Treatment Purchase Fund, NTPF, which, as Mr. Woods noted, has €130 million to spend this year; and three, a fund of €150 million coming through in the Estimates for the access to care plan. We are trying to use as much of it in the public system but the Deputy's point is well made around the fatigue in staff and the challenge in the short term of growing that capacity. We have a target of about €45 million to spend in the public system doing more public work through extended day and out-of-hours and using new capacity. We are also looking at using the private sector for a broader range of initiatives than we would have seen before.

The Deputy spoke of learning lessons. We have learned a lot about how we can work more effectively with the private sector. When our doctors work alongside their doctors, we get a better yield. That is a model that we will continue to use. Some exciting innovations are coming, which Dr. Hamilton may wish to speak on. For example, one challenge we face is endoscopy. No matter how fast we run, the growth in the waiting list gets ahead of us and Covid has made that a much more challenging issue. We are doing a couple of things. We are looking at rolling out PillCam, a camera that we can use, as part of our response. It has two benefits. One is to-----