Mr. George MacGinnis:

My comment was an illustration of the use of the capacity that the health services in Ireland have. If a bed is used for one reason, and that is an extra day's stay in bed because somebody is not able to do a ward round, that bed is therefore not available to somebody else. I agree wholeheartedly with members that the people I have met and talked to across the system want to deliver the best care possible. Under pressure, they feel the bounds of their world are often much more limited than the whole hospital, so they hold on to beds so that their patients can get into those beds. They are under pressure for other reasons so they are unable to do the ward rounds that would allow them to get people discharged faster. There are all sorts of reasons at a human and a practical level. When capacity is used in a way that looks like it is overused, and the trend of rising average length of stay in Ireland would suggest that, as a whole, the system is behaving in that way, that has an implication. That is what I was saying. I would say that. I would also preface my comments that none of us is a clinician. A number of the questions we have been asked are actually about clinical decisions, but we are able to look at the impact of clinical decisions system wide and comment on what the sum of those decisions means to the system and, in this context, specifically for capacity. That is the context in which we were doing that.