Mr. Bernard Gloster:

I do. There are two parts to it. On those services waiting for additional capacity to help them meet the demand they are experiencing, as I said, my job is to make sure that whatever the HSE part of the process is, I speed it up to the greatest extent possible without, obviously, being reckless, because that would not be any good either. There are steps we can take to improve significantly on that. I have discussed these with the Secretary General and the Minister. That will put other parts of the system under pressure to also speed up their parts of the process. It is about improving the realistic, informed hope of the public on the delivery of that additional capacity. We talked about the bed situation; 1,179 have been delivered already with 200 more beds to be delivered this year. Rather than talk about the X hundred other beds that somebody might think needs to be there, I have got to deliver on that. I have to shorten the process to do that. That is on the practical capacity side.

On the process side - Deputy Cullinane mentioned Waterford, and there are examples in other parts of the country - Deputy Durkan is right. When we tend to focus on something, we see a little or quick improvement for a day and then it is either back to normal or other priorities take over. That is the piece where I can take it up a level to a more consistent focus every day. I will say to the Deputy that apart from the medium- to longer-term planning and change work I have to do as CEO, already a significant part of my time in the first two and a half weeks in the job has been focused on changing our entire approach to improving those processes as much and as quickly as we can, in addition to sustaining and staying on top of them. I have been having conversations every day for the past five or six days about the number of people who are delayed in hospital in respect of their transfer of care out of hospital.