Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Shortall for her kind words and look forward to working with her and everybody else. The Deputy said quite fairly that if we are serious about accelerating Sláintecare, then we will work together. To be unambiguous, we are deadly serious about and committed to Sláintecare.

It is the pathway to universal healthcare, the introduction of which is ultimately our mission. We are not only committed to it but we want to accelerate it. We cannot accelerate it all at the same time but we want to go faster where we can. If the Covid crisis has taught us anything, it is that we need to modernise, move to the regional structures and move towards an area-based deployment of assets in healthcare as quickly as possible. I give the Deputy that commitment unambiguously.

I agree with the Deputy's point regarding the presentation of the financial data. That the performance metrics have not changed is, I think, because people have been so focused on responding to Covid. We all know that the target number of procedures for the given amount of money will be difficult to meet in an awful lot of cases. Many of the performance measures will, unfortunately, have to come down. One of the challenges we have is that a lot of the cost is still incurred, which means there is a lot of fixed cost versus variable cost. We hope there will be an acceleration that will mean the procedures which were missed earlier can happen. The other thing that happened is that many healthcare professionals who were working in paused care moved to do other things. For example, dentists were-----

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