Mr. Stephen Mulvany:

One of the lessons we have learned is that, to the extent it is practical, when arrangements can be put in earlier they should be. Now, it is not always possible to do that. On the specifics of the private hospitals, they have about 2,200 beds. Approximately 600 of them are day-case beds so they are not relevant to this particular discussion and another 150 are on sites where the type of services provided do not really fit the model that we are looking for. Remember, the private hospital system is largely geared to deal with surgical patients and the vast bulk of what we are talking about here are medical patients, but not all. At the moment, we have 180 patients in private hospital beds and we are actively looking for more.

For context, since January 2021, we have had three safety-net agreements during Covid, the last of which finished recently. In each of those three agreements, the average level of inpatient beds we hit was either 198, 148 or 125 so the 180 we are at now represents about 12% or 13% of the total capacity and is touching the highest levels we have had since Covid. Could we get more? Possibly, but remember the private hospital system is not the same as the public hospital system. It does not deal with medical patients in the same way as the public hospital system does and, as I said, most of the patients we are talking about here were medical patients.