Pádraig Rice (Cork South-Central, Social Democrats)

I thank the Senator. I have a number of questions I would like to put at this point. As I said at the outset in terms of context, there are real policy failures here and real lessons for the Department of Health and the HSE with regard to the long-term planning of health services. They need to be seriously considered and lessons need to be learned moving forward, particularly around the closing of the accident and emergency departments in Ennis, Nenagh and St. John's without a prior building up of capacity in UHL. This is something that cannot happen again. We need to be far better at long-term planning if we are putting those kinds of reconfigurations in place. The results have been catastrophic and have serious impacts on services and people in the mid-west.

I thank the witnesses for all of their work on this report. It is really important. It is crucial we have options on the table now and decisions made to rectify some of those and provide better services for people living in the mid-west. I also pay tribute to staff who worked in services that were massively under pressure and overstretched. They did Trojan work in circumstances that were not ideal and were really stretched. I also pay tribute to the people who have engaged in this process, including the stakeholders, researchers, community members and experts who have engaged with us and sent us questions they would like us to put to the witnesses, in particular Ms Sinéad Madden, who has sent some questions she would like to have answered. One of those is in regard to option C, which, as we know, is around developing a model 3 hospital somewhere in the mid-west providing a second accident and emergency department. Does HIQA have a position on where that should be? If we build a model 3, where in the mid-west should that be?