Mr. Stephen Mulvany:

I will add to what the Secretary General has said. We can provide additional detail on recruitment. In any year we recruit a net addition, this year it will be close to 5,000, we also have to recruit for the turnover. The actual number we will recruit this year will be in the region of 15,000 because the level of turnover is much higher than planned and much higher than last year. That has a big impact.

As the Secretary General stated, there is increase in investment in the number of training places for general practice. Slightly more than a decade ago there were approximately 120 intake places each year. It is now 260. The plan is to get it to 360 by 2026. That means today there are more than 900 general practice trainees in the system across the four years, and that needs to be increased.

As the Secretary General stated, in the first five days of this year, we had more confirmed Covid cases than in all of 2020. In March, we had more people in hospital with Covid than in the previous 14 months. Our waiting list targets were impacted by that. By the end of the year, we expect that, compared with the target, 82% of those waiting for outpatient consultations will be waiting for less than 18 months. Some 83% of inpatient day-cases will be waiting less than 12 months and the figure will be 97% rather than 98% for scopes. In most cases, we are now close to the position that obtained prior to Covid. All the waiting lists peaked in 2021. Two of them are down approximately 40% since the peak and the scopes waiting list is down 97% since the peak. We are not where we want to be but substantial progress has been made. We will tighten the targets for next year again and move from 18 months to 12 months and from 12 months down to a position where nobody will be obliged to wait longer than 12, nine and nine months, respectively. We know these are only interim targets along the way in the context of Sláintecare. This is not where we want to be, but we need to make progress over time. I will stop there.