Mr. Paul Reid:

I will take the three parts of the Deputy's question in the round. Covid has had a severe impact on our health services overall in terms of waiting lists and delayed care. We can see in our emergency departments that many people have delayed their care during Covid. We can see that because of the volume of patients, the frailty of some of them and the severity of their illnesses. As my colleague outlined, delaying non-urgent care was a part of our response to the pandemic. Health services have certainly been hugely impacted over the past 18 months.

We in the HSE and the Department are anxious to put together a kind of restoration approach, not only to deal with non-Covid illnesses but also to address the size of waiting lists. We want to do that from a few perspectives. We will, first of all, look at how we can increase capacity in the public system. That will mean significant extra recruitment and resourcing, for which we have funding. We have approximately 10,500 extra resources compared with January 2020. We have approximately 4,500 extra resources for 2021. We will probably add another 3,000 before the end of this year. On top of that, we have approximately 3,200 people working on our testing and tracing and vaccination programmes as agency staff who we want to convert to full-time employment. We have funding for resourcing.

This will be a significant challenge for the health service as we move to an approach that looks at increased public capacity. Increased utilisation of private capacity is also part of our plan. We are also examining a completely new way of delivering many of our services, using many new technologies and medical supports. We are going to take a comprehensive approach but it will be a massive challenge.