Ms Vanessa Hetherington:

Our simple answer is "No". We have such huge capacity issues across the health system. While no one can question the value of Sláintecare, where is the capacity? As many as 2,000 additional consultants and 5,000 additional beds are required, yet all we are talking about here are small day-case hospitals in three areas. There is no plan to recruit additional consultants to the scale required and we cannot even recruit and retain the consultants we have.