Mr. Paul Reid:

In fairness, at our most recent meeting the Chairman made the same points with regard to getting below the big numbers. There are 617,000 outpatients waiting, 75,000 inpatient day cases and 27,000 gastrointestinal scopes.

We have those figures broken down by hospital, specialty hospital group and community, and some of the waiting lists in the community. That is informing our strategic workforce planning. We are aware of issues in some rural parts of the country in particular, as Senator Kyne raised earlier, where we are having challenges in recruitment. We can, however, give the committee a greater sense or depth in terms of the big list, but also in terms of the level of activity that we carry out every year because sometimes the public do not hear that either. We carry out more than 5 million activities, between outpatients, inpatients, scopes and emergency departments procedures carried out in hospitals. Yes, we have a big backlog and it is our greatest challenge but we are, every year, doing higher and higher levels of activity and it is now about changing it all, as Mr. Watt said earlier. Yes, it is about resourcing, but it is also about changing those patterns. The Chairman referred to the pathfinder service at Beaumont hospital. Pathfinder is being rolled out at UHL, as he stated, and in other parts of the country, as is the whole frailty management piece that Ms Crehan-Roche spoke about. We do not just have pilots, we have pathways that we know work and that we want to roll out across the country as well as recruiting specialists. It is a decision for the Chairman and the committee, but it would be worthwhile to get greater depth on some of that.