Mr. Robert Watt:

I will ask my colleagues in the HSE to add to what I say. There are differences in performance and we monitor it. We collate and collect a large amount of data and we publish a large amount of it.

In regard to unscheduled performance, there are 29 emergency departments and, for the year to date, five sites that account for 45% to 50% of the trolleys. Within that subset - we know about Limerick, which is an outlier - there are differences that reflect historical investment, bed capacity, demand conditions within those catchment areas and other issues such as leadership culture, reform, and so on. We are always comparing. It is of course difficult to understand exactly what causes the differences in performance. That is not clear-cut. That is much more nebulous and not subject to a more quantitative analysis, as would be the case with the actual outturn data. All the time we are using the data to try to understand and then put in place improvement plans for performance where particular challenges exist.