Mr. Paul Reid:

I will make a few brief comments and then pass over to Dr. Henry, who has led with all the clinical teams on this. Nobody is more aware and conscious about providing compassionate care for mothers and babies than the HSE along with our medical and clinical teams. The HSE has a great history of doing that. We need to do things very differently to ensure infection prevention and control. Many of our 19 maternity hospitals are very old, with old hallways and antenatal rooms. They are not built for dealing with infection prevention and control measures in a pandemic. It is important to acknowledge that the infrastructure we have can expose people to risk.

We gave direction for four areas where we wanted to see consistency. As they are listed in the opening statement, I will not go through them. On those four areas, there are 19 maternity hospitals and as of last Thursday, 16 were fully working through and compliant with those measures. Three were not, which we-----