David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein)
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Okay. On a related issue, we are talking here about trying to decouple private activity from public care, and making sure that public patients have access to care. Maybe the head of the HSE, Mr. Gloster, might be able to take this one. We are seeing, at the moment, some private nursing homes saying that they may not take fair deal patients. There is a briefing for Oireachtas Members today from Nursing Homes Ireland regarding a PWC report on private capacity but again, the problem is that we are not building up public capacity. I looked at the latest public bed numbers versus private bed numbers. Private bed numbers have gone up, or private capacity. Public capacity has gone down in the last number of years. We are now at a point where some of those private providers are saying that they are not going to take fair deal patients because they are not happy with the subvention they are getting under the nursing homes support scheme. Two things need to happen. We need to fix that, on the one hand, which I would imagine is going to cost money, and we also need to increase public capacity. What is happening in that space? I ask because find that in a lot of these areas in primary and community care, we have become almost solely reliant on the private sector and then when problems arise for public patients, the State and the Government is over a barrel in some respects and we cannot seem to deliver. Maybe Mr. Gloster can outline to us what is going to happen in that space, because we are seeing some of these private nursing homes close, some of them threatening not to take public patients and I am not seeing the scaling-up in the public system, yet people need access to care.