Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)

I will come to this in the round in the first instance. The third-party insourcing we are referring to is a very small part of the overall service. It equates to two to three days' spend in the whole system. It is a very small part. The problem with third-party insourcing is that it was going in the wrong direction. The system was becoming dependent on it. At the same time, it was creating disincentives for what we are trying to do with the public system more broadly, which is to utilise the POC contract and five over seven and to maximise our use of theatres and diagnostics with our own staff rather than paying a third party to do it. We had to arrest that trend. That work needs to be done within the system. We have the funding in both normal insourcing and normal outsourcing to do it without that third-party element. It is about increasing our own productivity. That is a huge focus of the Department. We are seeing examples across the board. In Mullingar, evening sexual health clinics have now commenced and there are an additional 4,000 patients. We have changed the surgical clinical operating times to 8.30 a.m. from 9.30 a.m., allowing us to get through an additional 363 patients. There are all of these different tweaks. The neurosurgery unit at Beaumont needs an extra hour two or three days a week to increase capacity. These sorts of very targeted changes increase our overall productivity. That is the backdrop. I will ask Mr. Gloster to speak to some of the detail.