Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The short answer is "Yes". The Deputy will be aware that a painstakingly slow process must be gone through for hospitals. We are in the middle of that process for the national maternity hospital and are dealing with it to some extent for the elective hospitals. To try to deal with this, we have got agreement from the Department of Public Expenditure, NDP Delivery and Reform to reduce the number of stage gates, which is helpful and we are doing various things in parallel on the electives, including looking at similar design for the different hospitals across the country. In the meantime, I have one note of good news. The Deputy will be aware that the enabling works have now started in CUH for the surgical hub, which is the shorter-term solution while we wait for the elective hospitals to be developed.

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