Mr. Stephen Mulvany:

The ambulance handover delays - ambulances at the back of emergency departments - are a symptom of the overall congestion in the emergency departments. It will not get much better overall until we make improvements in that situation and there is a lot of work to be done around that. Our target is around 30 minutes as an average. While 40 or 45 minutes might be more realistic, we are at about 55 minutes to 65 minutes on average at different times, which is not where we would like to be. We know that for every ambulance that is parked behind an emergency department for too long, somebody else potentially cannot get access to the ambulance. There are lots of actions my colleagues can talk about in terms of what the National Ambulance Service is trying to do to mitigate some of that but the overall solution is not necessarily within the ambulance service. We cannot be complacent about this but if we look abroad, our nearest neighbours experience average ambulance delays measured in hours. We are focused on what we are trying to do. I ask Mr. McCallion to comment on some of the other specifics.