Mr. John Connaghan:

I will start off with a couple of comments on that and then ask Mr. Mulvany and Mr. Woods to add some colour to the question. It might be better if I start with the position over the last six months to a year. Let us understand the impacts of what we have seen over the last winter, going back to the last part of 2017. We know we had the worst flu season for ten years. The health service coped adequately with that but it did drive additional costs in terms of isolation, intensive care unit, ICU, costs and extended lengths of stay and intensity. That is one factor. We also had some of the worst trolley figures ever over the course of the last six months, although taken year on year, as Mr. Woods stated to the health committee yesterday, we are roughly the same. That period drove some really quite exceptional costs. I had to make some decisions during that time in the interests of patient safety in terms of sourcing additional capacity, authorising things like weekend and overtime work just to ensure we could get people out of hospitals appropriately. There were some decisions made around some of the winter pressures we had. With that in mind and as an introduction to the kind of pressures that the health service faces, I will turn to Mr. Woods to add some colour to that in respect of 2017.