Like winter, health service plans come and go. The question is will this new Winter Plan help cure some of the service ills?
While the extra €600m looks significant, the Irish Medical Organisation said it was emergency funding to just get services through the winter and that it does not deal with the fundamentals.
The Irish Hospital Consultants Association said there was no clear allocation of funding to hire additional hospital consultants and other frontline professionals.
It pointed to the fact that two-thirds of the €600m will not be deployed until 2021. The number of extra acute hospital beds may be short of what some people expected.