Mr. Damien McCallion:

I can come in on that. Perhaps Ms Hoey might do so as well. We monitor attacks on staff and other incidents. That is managed at local site level. I fully accept what the Deputy is saying. There are many challenges in our emergency departments. The Deputy has articulated some of those in terms of the attacks on staff and patients in certain instances. Each hospital has authority over security in that regard, which we pushed through with them. That is one aspect. Another is trying to track and report incidents involving not only staff, but also patients, so that we can look at the sites and hours where there is the greatest risk and ensure support is provided accordingly.

By their nature, our emergency departments are not risk free. That is a challenge because we cannot eliminate the risk completely, but there are protocols for dealing with it. Security in emergency departments is one of the aspects that people have been asked to look at in terms of strengthening it, if needs be. For example, we had to do that recently due to events in the city to ensure that we had increased security at some of our hospitals.