Dr. Mick Molloy:

There are a number of issues arising from UHL, one of which is the reconfiguration. Two smaller emergency departments were closed and now the patients are being brought on an extended journey to UHL. If those patients arrive late into the evening, there is an HSE target time of six hours from the patient arriving to discharge, which could end up being 2 a.m., 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. At that time, there is often great difficulty in trying to get those patients back home. The default in that scenario and the safest thing to do is to admit those patients at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. rather than discharging them into an area with no public transport and no ambulance that can convey them back home because of the shortage in the ambulance service. Therefore, we have a structural difficulty. If the hospital were able to engage ambulance services to work predominantly for the hospital on a 24-hour basis to take the patients home again-----