Professor David Keegan:

That is absolutely critical. We cannot be coming back with incremental costs that are going up every single year. We realise that. The whole point of doing a transformation exercise, rather than throwing more money at a growing problem the cost of which will exponentially rise, is to enable the deployment of lean principles to reduce waste within our system. This is in line with the concepts of Sláintecare, the regional health areas and moving services into the communities in order to lower the cost of care delivery.

Also built into this is the training, education, research and innovation team of Dr. Una Cunningham, Dr. Colm O'Brien and Dr. Paul Moriarty. They are committed to training from within our group. We recruit at a low base and train the expertise within our group. That is across lean transformation as well as nursing, technicians, optometry and orthoptics, with everyone working to the top of their licence, where they are legally permissible in the State, in the delivery of eye care. We are very fortunate that we have high-quality eye care professionals in Ireland, but we are not using them efficiently and effectively enough for the care of the population of this country. We should not have these wait lists. I want to bring Dr. Rogers in on paediatrics.