Professor Donal O'Shea

Not straight away, actually.

No, it was only when I actually went into and saw the virtual ward and realised that actually it's not virtual.

It's really a hospital at home and you're in your bed at home, but you have the contact.

Yeah, and beds and capacity are a huge issue.

So when I qualified in 1989, the population of this country was three and a half million.

Now we have a population of five and a half million, an older population, a more complex population.

In 1989, we had 18,000 acute beds in the system.

We now have 11,000 acute beds in the system.

So the virtual ward is a great initiative, but it's not going to solve the capacity problem.

This is going to help with, and has already helped over 1,600 patients through the virtual ward.

Yeah, they need certain investigations and they need to be monitored for the infection they have to make sure it's settled fully before they can go home.

And that's often, you know, somebody on antibiotics that should keep them for two or three days to make sure it's settled fully and they haven't spiked to temperature, as we call it.

It's going to be an essential and crucial.

crucial part of how we deliver healthcare over the next 5, 10, 15 years.

But I will repeat, our deficit in acute beds for patients with higher acuity who are more complex and sicker, that is the most critical thing that needs to be addressed in our medicine and emergency medicine kind of landscape at the moment.