Mr. Patrick Lynch:

I will start with that point. There are 6,000 rooms, and 4,600 of them are clinical spaces. If we walked into many of the rooms, we could say they are substantially completed but not to the quality we would expect in terms of a handover. In the context of this accelerated programme, that would be one of the priorities for us. Commissioning sounds like you would just put in all your equipment, but about 100,000 pieces of equipment must be brought in and located in the hospital. More importantly, though, about 36,000 individual pieces of equipment will have to be connected to what is now a single digital hospital. That is a very complex process in itself. Some of the equipment is almost next-generation equipment.

Regarding the staff who will be coming in and working the hospital, this will involve not just the integration of three teams from three different hospitals, who have different histories and cultures and will now have to work together, but every single process in the hospital will be different. Commissioning, therefore, is not just about getting the equipment in and plugging it in. It must all integrate and work properly with a paperless hospital, where every part of the record for a child will be live. The diagnostics will be available live. Probably for the first time ever for children in Ireland too, the family will own that record and have access to it. Equally, every clinician will have access to it in real time.

Much of that work can be done and set up. It will, however, only be when staff can get into the building and start to simulate what it will actually mean and what every new process will mean clinically that it will be possible to continue it. We would then think of some of the urgent areas like the theatres or critical care unit. All the equipment there is going to be new and the ways of working are going to be new too. These are really high-risk situations, so this cannot be done sort of before the staff go in. People really have to be embedded first. There is then a need to test all those processes, because on day one when the children start coming into the hospital, you want to be able to clinically stand over the fact that every single process has been rigorously tested to ensure every child transferring in will be safe. There is massive complexity to this. That is maybe to give a flavour of some of it