Professor Malcolm MacLachlan:

I will pick up on Mr. O'Regan's last point and the idea of low-hanging fruit. There is certainly interest from the third level sector in increasing training of health and social care professions.

We want to do that. It is about increasing the number of trained people and improving the way in which they are trained. In many traditional training courses, people are trained in a disciplinary way of thinking and it is only when they graduate and start practising that they navigate working in an interdisciplinary way. There are opportunities for us to develop new courses where people are trained in an interdisciplinary way from the beginning. Then when they graduate, they can hit the ground running. Graduate entry programmes in other countries in areas such as speech and language therapy and occupational therapy only take two years.

It is important that we are honest about the capacity of the system to change in a particular timeframe. It is not possible within a few months; it is possible within a number of years. We have to start work on it immediately and I would welcome the support of the committee in pursuing that.