Mr. Paul Reid:

I will make a brief comment on maternity first. I will restate that we fully understand the stress that maternity visit restrictions has had on women and their partners and families. We are doing everything possible to be as compassionate as we can while protecting young women and their babies as well. That is the key driver for us and for all our clinical and medical teams across the country.

Dr. Henry will answer on specifics but we get returns from the 19 individual maternity hospitals on the implementation of the guidance document that Dr. Henry sent out nationally. In fairness, I mentioned earlier that 16 of the 19 were fully compliant last Thursday. The three that were not put in measures to be fully compliant for this week. When I say a hospital is not compliant, it is not that those concerned are mischievously going out to be non-compliant. They have certain conditions in their hospital where they find it difficult to find the risk balance between access and visits and infection prevention and control. That is the rationale and the reason this happens.

As for the waiting lists for surgery, with every wave we have, our waiting lists for people for various forms of surgery and elective care are affected. The national service plan for this year has two funds, namely, the National Treatment Purchase Fund, NTPF, of €125 million and the access to care fund, which is about €210 million. We are working collaboratively with our colleagues in the Department of Health and with the Minister about an approach for the best use of those funds to address some of the waiting lists. To be frank, it has been significantly impactful for us, particularly with the recent cyberattack. It will involve a combination of using private capacity, using the NTPF, strengthening further capacity through the recruitment of consultants and other teams in our public hospitals and new ways of working that my colleague Ms Anne O'Connor has implemented during Covid, which involve many outpatient departments getting waiting lists in a very different way. That will be the overall strategy we will agree with the Department.