Ms Anne O'Connor:

Yes. There are two different things going on there. In terms of the ratio of nursing, which is what the Deputy is referring to in the first point, we have a higher ratio. Historically, we have seen that within our public units, we often take a different type of person. We will often take people who are more complex. We are looking at that in terms of the investment that has been made that has been referenced in terms of what has happened within the health service in the past two years as we contract beds elsewhere and look at how we actually manage the different types of needs. People now are living longer, have more complex needs and multi-morbidities. We have a need for different types of skilled staff. We certainly learned this during Covid in terms of our Covid response teams and we are trying to ensure we can support the broader area through our specialist staff. Generally, within the HSE, be it older persons' or other services, we try to focus on the higher acuity. We have higher nursing and staffing ratios. That is confirmed and there is no dispute around that.