Last month, hospital waiting lists stood at 887,000 people. Emergency department waits were on average 12 hours and the trolley crisis is worse than ever. Today, we learned that the HSE has instructed senior managers to draw up a cost containment plan as it expects to run over budget by €1.6 billion this year. The cost containment measures are to be rolled out across the National Ambulance Service. It is difficult to see how this could happen except through the mismanagement of our health service with the Government and the Minister for Health ultimately responsible. Patients deserve a guarantee that core services will not be cut because of the Government's failure to plan for our health service so can the Minister for Health outline what cost containment will be put in place and can he guarantee that any failure to manage the health budget will not lead to a cut in planned service provision this year?

As the Deputy is aware, the HSE is in the middle of the largest expansion in many years and part of the reason for the additional funds being drawn down by the HSE this year is that it is substantially ahead of its targets for treating patients. As we are all aware, there are some parts of this the HSE can control. One of the areas we are working very closely with it is on hospital operations. Funds were made available to hospitals for Covid measures, some of which have yet to be reversed out of the hospitals. We all have to appreciate that to a large extent, healthcare is a demand-led service. More people are arriving at emergency departments than ever before. It is ahead of projection here and around Europe, the North and Great Britain and, obviously, we do not turn people away from the emergency departments. The Government and I have been working very closely with the HSE to have the waiting lists fall. The waiting lists are falling but it does mean that the HSE is treating more people and is ahead of its targets in terms of the number of people to treat. We are working with the HSE across a number of measures, one of which is reversing out the Covid funding from the hospitals.