Professor Colette Cowan:

I do not mind at all if they do what I have just described. I can assure the Deputy they are not ignored. I have an executive management team. We meet every Wednesday morning on the hospital campus. Clinicians account for 50% of my executive management team. There are clinical directors who run the directorates to whom all the consultants report. There is an open-door system for them. There is a board where they can meet. They can raise their issues. All issues are brought to the executive management team meeting through the clinical director if a consultant is worried. The letter would have been discussed at the executive management team meeting. Professor Lenehan then dealt with the concerns. Real concerns were being raised. I would never block people from raising concerns like those because the authors of the letter are the people on the front line. We addressed the pathways for them but we were under a strict policy on Covid pathways, and we are not out of Covid yet. The consultants are under immense pressure. These people have worked tirelessly over the past two years and are quite fatigued. They did raise issues with regard to meeting. I met one of the consultants one on one. He is well known to me for a long time. We discussed many things and tried to address the issues he had.