Dr. Siobhán Kennelly:

It has had a significant impact, as we said earlier, in terms of mental and physical health. Significant efforts have been made in terms of education and training provision. We understand an awful lot more about the indirect impacts the Senator is speaking to as the months have gone by. There has been a huge emphasis on learning from what the indirect impacts will be.

There will be a long tail to the pandemic in terms of the needs of residents, families and others in a residential care setting. We will need to do a lot more work and research to understand what the long-term impacts will be. They should inform the safe staffing levels we are talking about and the multidisciplinary needs of the model in terms of the multidisciplinary supports that people need and our entire social care system.

We must remember the direct and indirect consequences are similar for very vulnerable people who are living in the community outside of the nursing home and are isolated in their homes and experiencing equally deleterious effects. For those who are interested, there is a report on the impact of cocooning available on the HSE website. It outlines a lot of the impacts we have spoken about today and details the feedback from voluntary agencies, the nursing home expert panel report and others in a very detailed way to demonstrate our learning and the kind of positive impact that community and voluntary support groups have had in mitigating some of that impact. It is available for members if they want to read it.