Ms Eilísh Hardiman:

I will start and Ms Kelly might come in. It is heartbreaking to hear that people think they have to leave the country because their child's condition will not be dealt with. We have excellent physicians and many patients who come through our systems are treated very well and very successfully. When we got investment and addressed this issue we made a significant impact. We will never have zero but we had 147 patients on our waiting list in January of whom 70% were waiting less than four months. That is not bad considering the constraint we still have, which is far less infrastructure than what we will have in the children's hospital. At a high level, we currently have 13 theatres; we will have 18 in the new children's hospital. That takes time to develop.

We have a very good plan and the way to attract colleagues is how we have gone about it already. The Deputy heard Professor McCormack talk about colleagues going away to the people they know and then coming back. Our 14 physicians and surgeons are very clear about how they can develop the future trainees who are coming up. They support, identify and work with them and we in CHI do what we call proleptic appointments. We are even willing to appoint a surgeon to finish off his or her fellowship and then come back to us. These are the all the measures we are putting in place and people are attracted to the posts because of what we do. It is quite correct that those working in paediatrics are not driven by the private market. We are driven by trying our best to put the child at the centre and working with each child as much as we can. We have constraints because, as the clinicians quite rightly said, this is part of orthopaedics, which is a bigger area we have to address and a big factor in the numbers I read out earlier for children trying to access paediatric services.

Credit has to be given to some of the clinicians for being quite innovative about some of the ways to address the waiting list. From a global perspective, our outpatient waiting list is going down. It is long but is going down because of the initiatives we are putting in place. Our day cases are also going down although our inpatient numbers are not. That is the area that has been impacted to a major degree. It is one of the challenges I outlined along with the fact that our hospitals are pretty much full of infectious disease and respiratory syncytial virus, RSV, cases, in which we have experienced a major surge. It is quite complex. I will ask Ms Kelly to talk about some of our initiatives to try to give assurance that we are trying to be as innovative as possible before we get to the new children's hospital.