Mr. Gerry O'Dwyer:

In conjunction with my colleagues in the estates, we commissioned Arcus to produce a report on the estate and the requirement, based on scientific knowledge. It is a UK company which specialises in healthcare consultancy. Its team has about 40 years of experience in global health economies. We engaged it to undertake this work. It met a number of clinical staff working in the system and all the professionals provided input to the work. The idea was to conduct a health planning process to strategically examine current and future capacity requirements in a number of hospitals. We started in Waterford. That will probably be completed in the next two to three weeks. We finished our reports on Cork University Hospital and University Hospital Kerry. We will carry out similar work in South Infirmary-Victoria University Hospital, Mercy University Hospital, and the rest of the group of hospitals. It is important for us to ensure that we align investment decisions with objective planning and real data on demand factors. This is why this work is so important to us. This will help us to work with population health and my colleagues in strategy and planning when looking at demand factors over the next ten to 15 years, working closely with the board and the Department of Health.