Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 23 June 2021

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health

Update on the Cyberattack, Covid-19 Vaccination Roll-out and Covid-19 Restrictions in Maternity Hospitals: Health Service Executive

Mr. Paul Reid:

We have always kept all of our response elements in respect of any surges or waves of Covid and still do. For example, the approach right now focuses on our testing centres, which are still available on the basis of referrals from GPs, which have been impacted during the Covid pandemic, but which are also now available for walk-in testing. As will have been seen in the last few days, we have also put in place pop-up centres in areas where prevalence of the virus is high. That continues. The increased capacity in our testing, swabbing and laboratory facilities continues. We have retained our resourcing in respect of contact tracing, should another surge emerge. Our surge processes in respect of hospitals have been maintained. There are high levels of demand right now. This is not a time at which we would welcome another surge but the process our IT consultants worked through during January and throughout every wave has been exemplary. They have been able to surge extra capacity and extra resourcing. It is certainly not a process through which we would like to go again.