Dr. Sara Burke:

One of our colleagues in the Public Gallery carried out some research on this, which I will be drawing on. The safety-net agreement, which was the initial deal done with private hospitals in the early weeks of the pandemic, was concluded within ten days or three weeks. A big contract was put in place with all private hospital providers. That was when we were looking at New York and Bergamo, where they were running out of ventilators and hospital beds. I fully praise the health system for what it did in that short period in that it bought capacity in case we needed it. We did not actually need all that capacity, and it ended up being an expensive option, but it allowed many patients to have critical cancer or brain surgery during the pandemic, because they were the ones who went to the private hospitals and the public hospitals, by and large, dealt with the Covid patients. I am not as critical as the Cathaoirleach is regarding what happened. It was the right thing to do at that time. It is easy to look back in hindsight and say we did not use all the beds and it was expensive. The measure was important.

One of the point coming out of the research was that the public system did not really understand how the private system worked and, therefore, if we wish to utilise all the resources of the State, we need to better understand the different components of the system, especially when we have a system that is so dependent on private aspects.