Mr. Damien McCallion:

Some of those actions identified are only possible for a short period of time. We cannot expect staff voluntarily to provide the extra hours and so on that we talked about. GPs and private hospital access are time bound in terms of extra sessions. Those measures are part of the winter plan but were activated at a point when we were coming into that pressure period. They are not sustainable throughout the entire winter which, as we know, runs from November to March. The pressures will continue for the next number of months. Those measures were activated as part of the response of crisis management teams at a point in time because we know they will be time bound and we can only implement them for a short period.