Professor David Keegan:

The figure for inpatient care is a fraction less than 1%. We do a lot with general anaesthetic. At the Mater, five inpatient day beds are allocated to our specialty because we are part of a general hospital, yet we still would deliver 54,000 outpatient and emergency visits, 10,000 injections and 3,500 surgeries. The vast majority are day cases, so the day case unit with the new theatres gives us a real opportunity. That is being replicated in other units around the country. We do pretty much all of our work on a day-case basis, aside from emergencies, such as those involving intraocular foreign bodies, ruptures or medically unstable patients. By unstable patients, I am referring to brittle diabetic patients or people with other comorbidities.