Professor Robert Landers:

There is no doubt that we are facing a tsunami of missed or late care.

Unlike the Covid crisis, we know exactly the scale of this. It is huge and it will stretch our health services to the absolute limit. Equally, there is no doubt the public health system as structured does not have the capacity, either in terms of personnel or in terms of infrastructure and beds, to deal in a timely fashion with the tsunami. In the short term, we will have to work with private providers to address care. In the medium and long term, we need to start planning now. We need to put this capacity into our system to build up the number of consultants and the number of public hospital beds available so that people will not wait. As I have said, this was entirely predictable. We can go through it specialty by specialty in terms of the numbers but we need to act now. There is no point in waiting for six months on this. We need to start planning now and we need engagement with the Department of Health and the Minister on this.