Mr. Stephen Mulvany:

The report was published at the end of December. It indicated that the average cost in a private nursing home was about €900 a week and we are reimbursing public nursing homes with about €1,600 whereas the costs are more like €2,000. Specific recommendations flow from that Value for Money report some of which feed back into two other reports, the Expert Panel on Nursing Homes and also the NTB Price Review. As we said earlier, there is no mystery as to why the HSE's public cost of care is higher. That is not necessarily a bad thing in terms of the richer mix of nursing staff and so on. However we are doing a bed census at the moment which is nearly finished on all of our 7,000 public nursing home beds, long-term and short-stay care. Some of them are closed. We have to see which ones we can reopen, which need to stay closed and so on. The aim is to set out a national framework by the end of the year for what the appropriate level of cost should be for public nursing homes, how beds should operate and the overall model.