Professor Cathal O'Donnell:

I thank Mr. Morton. The traditional ambulance model where someone rang us and we went out to them in an ambulance with two paramedics and brought them to hospital, unless they told us they did not want to go, is the historical model and not nuanced enough for modern healthcare. We have an aging population and a much more complex healthcare system. What we are currently doing, and what we are going to build on to do in a much wider fashion, is identify patients who have low-acuity healthcare needs and try to address their healthcare needs in the community close to them so they do not have to go to hospital. That is good for the patient first of all, it is good for the hospital given the capacity issues we have in the hospital service and it is good for us because of capacity issues we have.

We have a couple of different threads to that. The one Mr. Morton mentioned is the clinical hub. We have had clinicians, that is, doctors and nurses, in our ambulance control centre for the last couple of years. We plan to increase that very significantly. We recently reached an agreement with Tallaght University Hospital for it to provide us with the clinicians, clinical leadership at consultant level and then nursing staff too.