Mr. Tony O'Brien:

I thank the Chairman. I will begin with the more straight forward questions from Deputy Browne. The service plan was approved by the HSE directorate in draft form last Thursday and submitted to the Department of Health on Friday. Under legislation the Minister has 21 days to consider that plan. He does not have to take the full 21 days, so I would expect that within the 21 days the plan will either be approved, rejected or amended, whatever the process is. The normal process is that within a day or so of its approval, it gets published.

In respect of the mental health allocation of €35 million versus €15 million, this is in my view an application of reality.

When the development of services is being prioritised, as is being done by that money, and that development is predicated on the recruitment and deployment of staff, as we enter a year and begin the process of recruitment, we need to know that in the second year we will have the full year cost and that we can pay the wages for the full year. There is, however, the reality that with the approval of the budget in November or October or a service plan in December, one will not be able to spend that full year cost in year one. That has been the pattern in recent years. The formula arrived at is that sufficient funding would be made available in 2017 to fund full year expenditure of €35 million in 2018. Experience indicates that this is about the right approach. It is our approach to retain any unspent moneys where they are on unspent, which includes mental health. I believe that the €15 million that is allocated and which will be addressed in the service plan when published will be appropriately expended in 2017 on mental health.

With regard to structures, I acknowledge that there is an issue with the website. It is not a good website, but there is a national information line on 1850 241 850, from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m. Monday to Saturday, where staff are available to answer such enquiries. As of last week a new live chat feature was introduced on the website which gets through to the same people. We recognise that it is not always the easiest website to navigate and that this is more of a problem with the website than it is with the services. Nonetheless, it needs to be addressed.

Reference was made to a mismatch with the health fora. The community healthcare organisations' report makes clear that they were structured in a way that would align well with the regional assemblies, which were priority policy at that time, and with an expectation - not our decision, of course - that at a future point the health fora would be realigned to those regional assembly boundaries. That speaks to one of the mismatches identified by the committee.

As to when we would run out of elective capacity and the issue of our approach to the multi-mobility, I will ask my colleague Mr. Woods to address that and then I will come back to the other points.