James Reilly (Dublin North, Fine Gael)

I made quite clear what we have done to address it. I will relieve Deputy Ó Caoláin's confusion for him on why different procedures have different catchment areas. It is simple and we alluded to it only a minute ago. There are hospitals that are local, there are hospitals that provide regional services and, therefore, the region becomes their catchment areas, and there are hospitals that have national tertiary services, the catchment area of which is the country.

What has arisen in this case is that some hospitals, with their budgetary constraints, saw that patients were not in their regular catchment area for ordinary secondary care and would not accept them when in the past they had been accepting them. We have stopped that. This will not be a problem under money-follows-the-patient, which is rolling out as we speak. We started in orthopaedics and it will roll out across all the specialties. Under that scenario, hospitals will be getting paid for each patient whom they treat. This is another really important part of getting rid of a self-serving system and turning it back into a patient-centred service.

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