Mr. Stephen Mulvany:

There is no target level for patients on trolleys because there is no acceptable level of people awaiting admission to hospital. Our daily Trolley Watch figure indicates that if there are more than 236 people waiting for admission on a trolley in the morning, the system is in the red. The system goes into green at a level that is much lower than that, but even that is not an acceptable level of emergency department, ED, trolley waits, as we have said. What are we doing about it? I suppose the positive news is that once we recovered from the first week of this year, which was the worst week we have had on record in terms of trolley waits, the system stabilised and gradually improved week on week in the three weeks after that. Again, we are not saying this is a good position. We are simply saying it is a better position than it was, to the extent that in each of those three weeks up to week 4, which was last week, the waits at 8 a.m. - as I said, even one person waiting is not acceptable - were lower than all of the years outside the two pandemic years when the issue did not really arise for different reasons, going back to 2017.

The task for us is to see to what extent the impacts of the additional measures we have put in place have enabled that, which of those can be maintained or which will need to be stood down and then reintroduced once we can make them sustainable. We are focused on reducing the trolley wait as much as possible.