Mr. Robert Morton:

It is important to say it is not just about what the NAS does; it is also about how we work with other services. There are considerable developments in our enhanced community care programme that our colleagues in community services are developing, with regard to the integrated care programme for older people or the integrated programme for chronic disease management. There are natural synergies that flow across the health system. We are developing community paramedics. In west Cork, our long-term ambition is to have community paramedics operating in the west Cork area. They would interact with local GPs, but they would also connect patients with older people services and chronic disease teams, locally, as part of community help networks. That is where somebody accesses care through 999 but, in fact, what we do is we connect with them, deal with the immediate exacerbation of their condition and then plug them in to all of the other local services. That is the future of healthcare in Ireland. It is not about taking everybody to hospital. It is about only taking the patients to hospital who require large, acute hospital care, whereas our historical model is about taking everybody to hospital, whether they need to go or not. That is the big change we are embarking on.