Dervla

You know, that can absolutely be provided.

What they're actually saying, and if you look on the website, what they're actually saying is we'll do the best of both worlds.

That's the phrase that they use, which is they will use the public facilities and top it up with kind of extra private facilities.

And, you know, the continuity of care, care for every single woman, every single woman, you know, who goes into Sunderland or any other hospital should be determined by her medical needs, right?

So the care program for every woman should be determined.

And it should be, what does this woman need?

Many women do not need, you know, in particular, you know, a continuity of care provided by a specific consultancy.

Remember, sometimes, again, if you look on the Rotunda website, it'll tell you, even if you book this private care, you may not get it because the consultant may not be available.

But can we just remind ourselves what we're talking about here?

We're not talking about a supermarket.

We're not talking about a consumer service.

We're talking about a publicly funded healthcare system.

And in a publicly funded democratic healthcare system, the nature of the care that every single woman is entitled to is the care that her particular condition requires.

For a lot of women...

Absolutely the best option is, you know, the midwife-led service for a lot of women, and a lot of women still do this, you know, it's what we did, is kind of shared care between their GP and the hospital.

You know, there's lots of different kinds of needs, but for the master of a publicly funded hospital to come out before the Ructus Committee and say effectively what he was saying, and Chris Fitzpatrick, who's the former master of the Coombe, has been very...

good about pointing this out.

What they're basically saying is that there will be different levels of safety applied to women in relation to whether they can pay or not.

And that is, to me, astounding, and nobody can stand over it.

I don't believe that there's a single midwife working in our healthcare system.