Dr. Kathleen MacLellan:

First, €150 million in extra funding has gone into homecare this year to deliver an extra 5 million homecare hours. Some €127 million has gone in to configure 1,250 beds for intermediate care to provide for a re-ablement model in the community. The ESRI is just completing a demand and supply model for us in regard to part of the basis for the statutory homecare scheme. Significant funding has gone in for the establishment of a national homecare office, which will underpin the statutory homecare scheme, and that is scheduled as part of the national service plan, NSP, for 2021 in addition to the roll-out of the InterRAI single assessment tool, for which funding has gone in for 128 assessors. There has been significant progress in terms of increasing the capacity and progressing the key elements of the statutory homecare scheme.

We have taken significant lessons and learning from the evolving disease and what has happened internationally. One of the clear things for us, and the ECDC, NPHET and HIQA have all said this in their risk assessments, is that high levels of community transmission make it absolutely impossible to keep Covid-19 out of nursing homes, so our job-----