Professor Steve Thomas:

How one increases the capacity in the system to do that is an important point. We also need to be clear that we are dealing with a lot of burned-out and demoralised staff for whom there is a limit to what they can work, which means we have to train extra staff. This brings us back to Sláintecare and some of the targets that were set very early on, in the first few years, to expand our capacity in that area so that we could move towards providing an enhanced capacity within community care. Once we do that, we can move care out of the hospitals, which will liberate them to deliver more elective care. The whole system will then fit together. I agree that we need to focus on the expansion of primary and community care. That goes back to the earlier point of liberating capacity to deal with elective care in the hospital setting.