Dr. Colm Henry:

There were well-established protocols in hospitals for dealing with different types of infection depending on how contagious they were before the pandemic, including clostridium difficile and, as the Deputy referenced, MRSA, where the practice is to isolate and to ensure that the risk is not passed onto other patients. We are dealing with greatly varying infrastructure in our hospitals apart from any deficit in capacity and hospital beds. There are some very new hospitals with many single rooms and others have shared wards. Our hospitals as they are configured and built are not attuned to the reduction of transmission of infection disease and that was thrown into stark evidence during the Covid-19 pandemic when we had to urgently build extra capacity and streamline patients and ensure we cohorted patients with Covid-19. I will ask Dr. O'Dwyer to comment on any additional work we do. What we attempt to do, but do not always succeed, is to isolate patients or to cohort them.