Dr. Kathleen MacLellan:

I will take the question about whether a hospital can operate without a licence. This is the transitional arrangement. Our working group, which comprised HIQA, the Private Hospitals Association, the HSE and ourselves, had quite a bit of discussion about this as to whether one would turn around and say "You cannot operate until you have a licence" or "You can operate without a licence". The reason we came down on this was that someone operating a hospital, be it private or public, must apply for a licence within three months. Once the hospital applies for a licence, it will come in under the purview of HIQA. Ms Mary Dunnion will probably speak quite well about a well-established risk assessment process as to which hospitals to go into first. We talked about the logistics of this as well in the working group. We probably have up to 60 hospitals, perhaps even more, that will need to be licensed. It is not feasible to check through all those mandatory regulations within a month, two months or three months. It is important, therefore, to create a system. Within the general scheme we have created a system whereby all these hospitals will come under the authority of HIQA as quickly as possible. They may not have their full licence but they will come under the regulatory gambit then as per the licensing Bill. This gives a much stronger case of regulation of those hospitals, if that makes sense. That was the discussion, and we debated the best way to approach that at length.

I might just-----