Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

We will get the figures, but it will take a reasonable period of time to so do. No one is denying the reality of the impact of Covid on non-Covid care. That is why the winter initiative and what we are trying to do right now aim to manage Covid and resume services, including screening services. As the Deputy is aware, three of the four screening services have resumed screening using a phased approach. It is projected that BreastCheck will resume screening this month. That is on the screening side. There is a fair degree of catch-up there. Many clinical staff continue to work within the programmes and people who were in the system at the time of the pause have continued to be treated as hospital resources allowed. For example, women availing of BreastCheck screening services who had been screened continued to have their assessments completed and their treatment plans mapped out by the services. Surgeries continue to be scheduled and completed. There is ongoing work on the screening side and that has resumed. That is also the case in other areas. Part of the winter initiative is designed to prevent people from going into hospital in the first instance in order to free up capacity for electives. It is interesting when one looks at private sector capacity during the lockdown, one can see that no one went into private hospitals either. That seems to me to be the reason the private hospitals were quite-----

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