Professor Colette Cowan:

I thank Deputy Quinlivan. We will extend his thanks to the staff, who are fantastic and who do a very difficult job every day.

Once again, we are very clear that we do not support or feel comfortable about patients having to wait in the emergency department, but it is a capacity issue for us. What are our plans? The Deputy is quite right that the 96-bed block will take two years to build, which is quite fast but still too long for us. It will be 48 replacement beds because, as the Deputy will know, we have Nightingale wards, which are not safe, and our outbreaks in the hospital around infection control are, in the main, in those large wards. They are no longer SARI-compliant. The replacement beds are exceptionally important for us. What is the plan? We have looked at our capital development plan. We have also looked at the developments in the community because, heretofore, the societal view has been that everybody comes to the emergency department for treatment and care. The Deputy is quite right that we would all stop and think about whether we should go to an emergency department and whether we want to wait long hours for treatment. However, we are only in the infancy of developing services in the enhanced community care programme, which my colleague, Ms Bridgeman, will speak to. That will create alternatives for older people especially to go elsewhere other than into our emergency department for treatment. It is important to be aware of that. We have to balance that significant budget, and funding has come from the Government into the enhanced community care programme. That is a number of years of project work that will go ahead. UHL, in particular, is a very busy hospital, and all our patients tell us that once they get in, the care is good and they get through the system. It is a matter of getting through the emergency department doors. With the bed capacity issues, we are working towards that. We have done a lot of work in developing the services. It is our view, however, that we need a second 96-bed block. We have started working on that and talking to the system about what that would look like but, again, that would be five to ten years away. What we have to measure under the health population needs, on which a significant work is about to commence, is how many patients will divert from the ED to the enhanced community care programme and how many patients will be in our hospitals getting emergency care. UHL is an emergency care hospital, a complex surgery hospital and a designated cancer centre. Other work will have to be diverted to other areas. It is our view as-----