Mr. Paul Reid:

I will ask Ms O'Connor to respond separately to the Deputy's kind comments and on the Sláintecare initiatives.

On the Deputy's first point, I do not disagree with her. I have often used the same example of universal healthcare in terms of what happened in Covid. The Deputy used the example of testing and tracing and vaccination. During that period, these were free, as the Deputy said, and prioritised based on need. We worked down through the sequencing on vaccination and testing and tracing. Those are classic examples of what a public health system should be about. They are really good ones for us to leverage.

The second part of Deputy Shortall's contribution was on some of the themes and a concern she has, on which I do not disagree with her, that Sláintecare can be seen as something separate as opposed to being embedded in the line system. That is part of the approach in terms of new governance structures, with the Secretary General, Mr. Robert Watt, and I overseeing it, our line management teams having responsibility for it and Mr. Woods coming to work in a role to make sure the line is engaged in the design and implementation of it. However, let us stand back from the Sláintecare process, change management for regions and what happened during Covid and is in place now - Ms O'Neill and Ms O'Connor might want to comment on that - and look at some of the core fundamentals that we have had to put in place. Enhanced community care is happening and that has been a combination of factors. As regards community health networks, 96 teams are to be in place and over 50 of them are now in place. We have been resourcing the community specialist teams, for example, for older persons and chronic diseases and illnesses. Approximately 1,500 people of approximately 3,100 people have already gone into them. The National Ambulance Service now plays a new role. It does not only provide paramedics 24-7 and bring people to acute hospitals but treats people outside of the hospital system, including in nursing homes. We played a new role during Covid in providing supports and commitment for nursing homes. As I said, one of the examples in Covid, which we are trying to embed and leverage, is a single integrated process between primary care and GP care and the acute services. One of the ways we have done that is giving GPs access to diagnostics. There were 140,000 last year and we are up-----