Mr. Bernard Gloster:

It is part of the plan to expand that service. There are different models around the country. In some places it is called Pathfinder, in others it is called emergency department in the home, EDITH, and so on. That is the type of model we are trying to do. From my perspective, all of the services we have in the community currently are not available to people in nursing homes and that is the part that will change in the coming months.

On the issue of Saturdays and Sundays, it was done by my colleagues in January for a period. We had a very detailed engagement yesterday with hospitals and community healthcare staff. While people have contracts at the moment that I cannot unilaterally change, the chief clinical officer and I will be confirming in writing to all of the services today that we are asking people to volunteer to change their deployment arrangements in order that we can cover the Saturday, Sunday and Monday of the bank holiday weekend. We know from the May bank holiday weekend, that we were caught very badly, by virtue of the fact we do not have that availability at the weekend.

We would obviously have to look at additionality of staff if we were going to sustain that every weekend. Essentially, if the health service does not move from on-call working at weekends to actual service delivery in the community and in hospitals, it will continue to experience serious problems every Tuesday morning. I am on the public record as saying that I am intent on changing that. That will take a period of negotiation but we are trying it on a voluntary basis first.