Mr. Damien McCallion:

I will let Ms O'Neill in shortly. I will go back to the Deputy's point on nursing homes. During Covid we had weekly engagement with nursing homes and we have continued this throughout the winter. We have engaged with Nursing Homes Ireland at a national level every week. The process referred to in the context of the census was helpful. We pushed that out into the system and I talked to some of the chief officers who look after the areas. In Cork and Kerry, for example, which the Deputy will be familiar with, all of the nursing homes that had vacancies at that point were known to the CHO and they engaged with the hospital daily about those. There may be only one or two people who have that decision on a given day and who must go to long-term care. As I said earlier, there are only 221 of those patients in the hospital today for long-term care. That is a big decision. It is inevitable there will be some timescale involved with a number of days for patients to make that decision. It is a huge change. They may go into hospital expecting to go home, and now the patient and his or her family must look at long-term care. It is inevitable there will be a timeline there. They work with those nursing homes. If one only has one or two such patients a day, and while there may be a lot of nursing homes in the geography, the patient may never want to go there. It is the patient's choice ultimately where he or she goes and transitional care kicks in.

I might ask Ms O'Neill to talk about the transitional care system.