Mr. Robert Morton:

There are mitigation measures that we can implement. One such measure, which is frequently used outside of Ireland, is a process called cohorting. Effectively, if there are four ambulances parked outside an emergency department, two crews are asked to look after four patients and the other two crews are released. It does not fix the problem but it does mitigate the risk to the patient who is most affected, namely, the patient awaiting a response in the community. That is the patient we are aiming to get to all of the time. The patient in the back of the ambulance is experiencing some degree of risk, as is the patient who is waiting in the corridor in the emergency department, but the patient most at risk is the one who is waiting in the community for a response. That is just one of the measures we are considering.

We are also looking at things like rapid handover protocols and a process known as fit-to-sit. Under the latter process, we ask whether all of the patients that we bring to the emergency department really need to be on a trolley. That is something that we have to ask ourselves honestly and it may be more appropriate for some patients to sit in the emergency department rather than waiting for a trolley to be handed over. There are no immediate fixes, as Dr. O'Donnell said earlier, but there are some mitigation measures that we can take that we are actively working on at the moment.