Dr. Colm Henry:

There were delays that were contributed to by some uncertainty over the governance model. Also, as I mentioned earlier to one of the Deputy’s colleagues, the fact that smaller teams were not as effective has informed the design and roll-out of the remaining teams, which will be bigger in number, and the CEO has referenced 13 per team. The other contributing factor was that there was an absence of some key specialties, including that of consultant. Part of our risk response in addressing the needs of CHO 6 and CHO 7 will be to address the numbers on the team, the consultant presence and the governance, which would be identical for all of the nine teams, which, as I said, will be of 13 in number.

Although I am not making excuses, it sometimes happens that when we have a new design for a new community-based team, we trial it out in a few areas and we learn from whatever things do not work there. Clearly, the size of the team and the governance were not operating in the way we wanted them to, and that has informed the design and roll-out of the remaining areas.