Mr. Robert Morton:

The two areas of greatest difficulty in that regard have been the south west and the Saolta footprint. Throughout winter, we have seen extraordinary efforts and great improvements in the area of turnaround times.

To put that into numbers for the Senator, throughout 2022 we saw a gradual process of reducing the average turnaround time across the country, which had been approximately an hour and six minutes. As we came into January, that was down to approximately 50 minutes. Pretty much every week over four weeks, the average across the country sat at around 50 minutes. Cork University Hospital, CUH, in particular made massive improvements. In fact, it is a shining example of what can be done. It really made huge improvements. How we effected that collectively and collaboratively was through a lot of effort from within the hospital but we also deployed what we call hospital ambulance liaison persons. Basically, these are members of the NAS who go in, work as part of the team in the hospital and try to lubricate the physical and clinical handover of the patient to get the ambulance back out as quickly as possible. That has worked quite well and has been very well received. We have very strong feedback on that from our colleagues in the Saolta University Health Care Group in particular, who have found it to be very effective. Generally speaking, there is now an incredible awareness within the hospital system of the impact of turnaround times on our ability to respond. We really get a lot of constructive engagement from hospital colleagues in that area.