Mr. Bernard Gloster:

In the next week to ten days, we will finalise with the Minister the approach for the rest of the year. That is similar to what I just said about the June bank holiday weekend. The core component will predominantly be work practices with some additional capacity measures. Very quickly after that, we hope to present to and agree with the Minister a three-year approach to the management of unscheduled care so not unlike what Deputy Shortall was saying regarding our strategic approach. We no longer have a problem in winter. We have a problem so it is a three-year approach to managing that capacity. A big part of that would be seven over seven working along with bed capacity that is coming on stream, the additional staff on top of the 20,000 we have already recruited since 2019 and the safe staffing levels for nurses, which will bring an additional 660 nursing posts into the service as soon as we recruit them. That will replace the winter planning.

The three-year plan as opposed to the rest of this year plan will include an ask of Government for certain things that might have traditionally been part of the winter plan. I think the Deputy will be familiar with it because it has been well rehearsed many times in this committee that by the time we get the winter plan written and agreed, the money that comes with it is very hard to spend in the winter. We are trying to take the unpredictability out of it and this sense of an annual event in that everyone is waiting for this big plan, which is not that big actually. It has served us well in the past but we have to move to an all-year-round plan.