Ms Eil?sh Hardiman:

One of the things we have assessed in particular is winter opening. As the Deputy will appreciate, there are additional risks related to the surge period. Our preference would be that it would be outside the November to February period because that is when we would have the RSV and other respiratory illness season. It is where we have huge surges. In migrating the hospitals, to get it to the absolute minimum number of patients - they are usually the sickest who need to be moved - we would be looking at our elective activity. However, when we are in winter surge very little of what we do is elective and a lot of what we do is emergency and urgent care, and those patients are quite sick. Our preference - it is a timing issue - is to open in summer 2025; that would be ideal for us.