Mr. Chris Nightingale:

We undertook a 16 week project with a four-week timescale for collecting data. We were still looking for stuff in week 12. That was something we encountered. However, we did get good information from the hospital inpatient enquiry data system. That was the main data source we used for in-hospital activity. In the opening statement we mentioned that initially the plan was to include theatres and diagnostics as key resources in the acute sector. It was not possible to get the associated data in the time available. We explicitly asked for it on several occasions. One reason was that we would have had to go to individual hospitals to get the data as there was no centralised dataset that we were given access to, despite requesting it. I concur with the statement on the data.