Ms Sandra Broderick:

The waiting list three years ago for inpatient day cases was 26,300 across the UHL group. Today, that figure stands at 6,300. This is from our core funding, insourcing and outsourcing and the NTPF funding. To say that it has been beneficial for the mid-west would be an understatement. It has been phenomenally successful. That is not to say that we have not become overreliant on it.

My colleague spoke earlier on our weighted average times. The national average is about seven-odd months and we are doing it in five and a half months. The Senator is right to spell out the specialty piece. We are really working on that and we have been raising with Mr. Gloster the number of specialty consulting posts we have in the region. This is something we need to build upon. We have a lot of reliance on locum consultants. Reference was made earlier to the agency spend. We need to attract the highest quality consultants into the region and put that specialty base in. While I am here to talk about the mid-west region, it would be remiss of me not to say that the specialty disparity between our region and other regions is pretty big. We are getting a lot of support with that and it is something we expect to see improvement on in the coming years. This will not happen overnight. There is not just an abundance of consultants out there ready to be appointed.