Mr. Damien McCallion:

The existing examples are often a mix including people you are trying to prevent going into hospital. The two the Minister announced in the service plan for next year in Limerick and St. Vincent’s are focused on those who would be in an acute bed. It is the same care and treatment as in an acute bed. There are very defined criteria. We will look at how successful those are. It has the potential to be an alternative to providing additional bed capacity. Given the timescale of building new beds, there is clearly potential in that. The team working on that, including Fran’s team, has gone to Norwich, in East Anglia, where it is probably the most successful. It varies depending on the specialties and the conditions people have, in terms of how well they are managed remotely versus being in the hospital. It is a relatively new concept but with a huge amount of potential, which I think was said last week. Although we have a number of those around the country, this one is different in the sense these are acute patients who, but for this, would be in an acute bed in the hospital. Some of the existing examples, like in Letterkenny, which is probably one of the most positive ones, also include patients avoiding admission, which is slightly different.