Brian O'Connell

Yeah, because GPs are often the ones who are trying to get access to diagnostic equipment for their patients.

Now, Dr. Nick Flynn is a GP and a chief medical officer with Bartra Primary Care.

He outlined the importance of access to diagnostics, but also how if you can pay to access scans privately, essentially you're skipping queues.

And he says this is creating a real health inequality.

Are patients having to pay for private scans at the moment to skip queues, essentially?

It's a mouthful, isn't it?

So to date, there are just over 5,700 rooms in total on the site.

78% have been offered at the completion standard.

Just over 3,200 have been validated by a design team.

The offer rate, they're telling me, declined in recent months.

So a four-week average, 150 rooms per week.

So what that means essentially is for the last four weeks, an average of 150 rooms per week have been offered.

There are currently, wait for it, just over 12,500 defects remaining.

Four and a half thousand of these have been offered to the design team for validation.

So a little bit of a road to travel yet on this one.

Next, though, as we've been reporting a 24-hour strike by the National Ambulance Service got underway at 8 o'clock this morning on Morning Ireland.

Earlier, SIP2 Ambulance Division organiser John McCamley said union members have provided emergency cover for acute cases during the industrial action.

Our reporter Brian O'Connell is outside the National Ambulance Service main depot for Cork City at the Gansale Road roundabout this morning.

He joins me now.

Good morning, Brian.