Ms Anne O'Connor:

On the winter plan, we met with the team in the west yesterday, from both hospital and community care, to look at how they are planning their unscheduled care activity over the coming months. That will feed into the winter planning process. It is hard to believe we are talking about next winter. The challenge in the west is where to put new beds. There is not an obvious spot to land in new acute beds. The solution in Galway has to be about how we access the community beds and what those beds do. Additional beds have opened in unit 6 in Merlin Park to support the acute services run by the community. We also have beds in some of the other community and district hospitals there. There are very good examples, whether in Galway, Mayo or so on, of how the hospitals and community work more collaboratively around virtual wards, for example, and the acuity within the community. We cannot necessarily build new hospital beds. We have talked about the big capital plans but there is a lot of scope in this area. To be fair, between hospital and community, Galway is one of the more integrated areas for ensuring people are discharged.

The critical bit for us is increasing the acuity for people who are discharged from hospital or to prevent people going into hospital in the first place, by ensuring the community is stepping up with community intervention teams, CIT, and outpatient parenteral antibiotic therapy, OPAT. These are all community-based programmes to support people who are quite acutely unwell. That is what they are looking at in the west. We met the group CEO and chief officer about what their plans are for the coming year.