Ms Anne O'Connor:

I will come in on some of the immediate actions that have taken place. In the past week, we opened 26 beds in Merlin Park University Hospital that are step-down beds to support the pressures in Galway University Hospitals, GUH. Those beds opened in that past week as an immediate pressure relief. Senator Kyne is absolutely right; the pressure on Galway has been unbelievably high for many weeks and months throughout the winter period. Any year in which we work with Galway in terms of its winter planning, as we did this year, they are very challenged in identifying a location where they could put extra beds, such as a modular build. We have been working closely with Saolta in that regard.

Galway has been on the top of our priority list for the past three winters. From their perspective, due to the lack of other capacity around them, unlike hospitals in other parts of the country around which there are different types of facilities, they are very challenged and they have not had as much capacity available to them in the private hospitals compared with other parts of the country. They are in a bottleneck. We have been working with them in terms of looking at their existing sites to see if there is capacity to build on the site of UHG, but that would involve them moving other capacity around. Therefore, the UHG site is not a straightforward site, as the Senator is probably aware of. For us, the solution lies in Merlin Park where there is obviously space. The immediate step taken in the past week was the creation of those additional step-down beds.