Mr. Bernard Gloster:

Regarding beds, the Minister has been very supportive of advancing a proposal for 1,500 beds in addition to what Mr. McCallion outlined in respect of the finishing-out of the previous plans this year with the 200-odd figure and so on. An expansive range of building of community beds is going on. A significant number of them are replacements, to meet regulatory compliance, and there are also new beds within that.

As for the 1,500 beds, rather than wait for the funding to come, an expression of interest has gone out to the market with a view to their being built in 100-block units with modern-build technology, which would greatly shorten the timeframe. The expression of interest has an indicative frame cost of about €1 billion, so that is the scale of what we are talking about.

I will ask Dr. Henry to address the issue of viruses in a moment. In the context of the overall health of the child population, he and his team have led our public health restructuring. We all now know the importance and value of public health and of having public health specialties. In the context of the overall health of the population and subsets thereof such as children, one issue we have to target, as I saw recently in the north west, relates to the variable uptake of aspects of the primary childhood immunisation programme and in vaccinations as they emerge in response to various viruses. There is vaccine hesitancy and a great of deal of what we could call false narrative around immunisation programmes and so on. Overall, we need to continue to improve the health of the child population as part of health resilience for when viruses and so on emerge.

In respect of the question on chief executives of hospitals and community services, I have had three of those management team engagements and they are held every three weeks. I am not sure they are all delighted with the engagements, but we have had three. The first one focused on the performance of the CHOs on delayed transfers of care because, in my view, delayed transfer of care is owned by the community, not by the hospital. The second engagement related to the performance of hospitals against the waiting list action plan, while the third one, held last week, concerned hospitals in the community working together. Each of the six hospital groups and their associated CHOs had to present me with plans last week for how they are going to contribute to managing capacity and urgent care for the rest of the year. That will now go into the in-year plan Mr. McCallion and his team are finalising for me. That has been quite a productive, if challenging, process. I will not ask my colleagues to comment on it because they might say something different, but it is part of the direction of travel with a view to performance-managing an entire system.

Dr. Henry might wish to comment on the virus question.