Dr. Mick Molloy:

Deputy Cathal Crowe mentioned the overcrowding in the hospital. I do not believe elective hospitals will have any immediate impact on that. Over a 20- or 25-year period we might then have fewer people developing emergency problems and needing to be admitted into UHL. That type of population demographic should require an elective hospital in that area.

The difficulty at the moment is the TrolleyGAR figures. I do not know if the committee receives them. There are directives from the HSE to hospitals not to count certain patients. We do not count somebody who is put into a day care bed, a day surgery bed, or the acute medical admissions unit. That now means all that activity cannot take place on the day.

We are just displacing other people and other activities, yet it is not reflected in the figures. The true TrolleyGAR figures could be twice as high as the numbers we have, and on some days could be well over 1,000 patients. If we have 11,000 beds and 1,000 trolleys, that means we cannot accommodate 10% of the emergency admissions we have, let alone deal with elective care as it stands. There is a huge capacity issue that must be addressed by fairly rapid modular builds at this stage. If we look back to the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, China was able to build a hospital with 1,000 beds in ten days. Why can we not do something similar?