Ms Josephine Ryan Leacy:

The starting point was the patient. We had a massive volume of patients waiting for over 12 months on our waiting list. When the NTPF was set up, which was a really good initiative, it was an opportunity for us, because we did not have funding, to support patients coming in as long waiters. What we did then was we identified where the need was. We have 17 different specialties in which we do outpatients, from an insourcing perspective. We looked at the critical need for the patient to get access. We work very collectively with the NTPF. We set down a specific business case for every specialty. We look at how much it would cost to deliver an outpatient, so it was a fee for outpatients. We would then factor in the pay and non-pay to be covered within that, and then employ the staff appropriately for that. We always felt it was cleaner to have the governance so that we knew who we were bringing in, we were managing it and we did not have any third-party vendor. What we did internally from a governance point of view was HR, finance and operations met monthly to ensure that, first, we were doing the activities we said we would do, to make sure that we were getting the income in to cover the cost of the staff and the non-pay to support the NTPF initiative.