Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Deputy's first point concerned the elective hospital strategy and, as he said, that is a plan for three very large elective hospitals covering approximately 500 procedures. It takes in Cork, Galway and Dublin. There was a significant change made recently and we got a Government decision on it. The proposal that came to me was that the elective hospitals would take day cases only and there was a very significant challenge to that from Members of the Oireachtas and local clinical communities. They said they wanted inpatient services as well so we changed the approach on that basis.

We will now do it in two phases. We will start with day cases, diagnostics and outpatients. This will be very important. Critically, the design of the hospitals will be for both, including phase 2, which will have inpatient services. If and when we go to inpatient, it will be fully integrated and will not just be an add-on. We are proceeding with them. The Department has received the revised business cases to take account of the inpatient phase as well. We will be sending them to the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform shortly, which will then do its work. We need to move this along very quickly. I know it is of particular interest to many members of the committee. That deals with the first issue.

The second issue is Limerick and that area. The Cork, Galway and Dublin electives are regional electives. They can and are intended to treat patients from the Limerick area as well. However, it is very clear that the University Hospital Limerick, UHL, is being asked to take on too much of the heavy lifting-----