Mr. Paul Donnelly:

I thank the Chairman and members for the invitation to appear before the committee to discuss my appointment. I was pleased to be asked by the Minister for Health, Deputy Leo Varadkar, to become the chairman of St. James's Hospital. Following a request by the joint committee, I welcome the opportunity to introduce myself and set out the main challenges and issues facing the hospital over the next period as well as to outline the future priorities for the organisation. I will summarise the key points in my short presentation. St. James's Hospital holds a unique position in the Irish health system. It is the largest provider of adult acute services nationally and, through a commitment to excellence in clinical care and business processes, it has achieved the position of being, in effect, a national health-care campus. The period of my appointment is a particularly exciting time for the organisation as this position can and should be further enhanced as a result of the major capital investments planned and already taking place on site.

As to myself, I have worked in a variety of roles over the past 25 years, primarily in technology businesses. I graduated from Trinity College Dublin in the late 1980s and spent the first years of my career working for the German engineering firm, Siemens, initially in the UK and then at its headquarters in Munich, Germany. I returned to Ireland in 1996 and joined what was at that time a reasonably small, privately held Irish software business with approximately 40 staff called IONA Technologies.

Over the following four years we grew that business to approximately 1,200 staff, floated on exchanges in Ireland and the USA and achieved a market capitalisation of circa $1 billion. At IONA I was responsible initially for delivering success through forging strategic partnerships and later for the product management of two of IONA's four market offerings. I left IONA in 2000 to form my own start-up and built that business from zero through seed funding and early-stage angel investment and later venture capital funding rounds. On that journey I hired a world-class multidisciplinary team, put the practices and work processes in place for success, mentored and guided the team through the earliest stages and took the business through product launch to closing our first customer revenues.

I have held a variety of roles over my career, including chief executive on more than one occasion. I have served on the boards of a number of commercial and voluntary organisations, including, most recently, two six-year terms from 2002 to 2014 as a member of the board of guardians and directors of the Coombe Women and Infants University Hospital. In that capacity I also served on the quality and risk sub-committee for six years, including two years as chairperson in 2013-14. I am a former member of the executive council of the Irish Software Association, the representative body of Irish software businesses. I am a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing. I am employed by Munich Re, a large German reinsurance business, where I currently act as the executive vice president for Europe, Middle East and Africa of its automation solutions division.

At present I am also a director of Personally Speaking, an Irish-based speaker bureau that provides speakers to corporate events throughout the world, and a director of the Clanwilliam Institute, a centre for systemic therapy and practice in Ireland committed to making psychotherapy services available and accessible to all. Personally Speaking is a commercial organisation while the Clanwilliam Institute is a registered charity.

In some ways I may have gone into more personal detail than committee members were expecting. However, as I move to describe the challenges, opportunities and priorities of the hospital over the next period my hope is that this detail will help give the members of the committee the context to better understand why the Minister may have sought to appoint someone with direct industry experience of guiding an organisation through periods of extreme growth and organisational change, someone who can demonstrate an entrepreneurial attitude to the opportunities such change presents while recognising the value of, and delivering mutual success through, strategic business partnerships, someone who can lead businesses which essentially succeed or fail depending on their ability to attract and retain high-quality top-tier staff as well as someone with specific and significant experience of good hospital governance, including the importance of demonstrable effectiveness of the quality, safety and timeliness of the services delivered and the need for robust financial, corporate and clinical risk management.

With this in mind I will set out what I believe to be the guiding principles of my term as chairman of St. James's Hospital. Fundamentally, I see my role as chairman to be no different to that of every other member of staff in the hospital, that is, to serve our patients and our community. The board of the hospital must ensure that we see the patient or community at the heart of every strategic decision we make. As chairman I will endeavour to build on the success and scale of St. James's Hospital and its many attributes, including its reputation for delivering safe and effective care. A major hospital is in many ways an ecosystem. There are many inter-connections and interdependencies which only become apparent when they are examined in detail. I will not try to fix what is not broken.

St. James's Hospital must continue to attract and retain the best staff. In health the quality of our care is dependent on the quality of our staff. Health care is a people industry and the best are attracted to work with the best. It is a virtuous circle.

I believe strongly in the integration of service delivery, research and education. During my time on the Coombe hospital board I had the great fortune and privilege to serve alongside Dr. James Clinch. He used to frequently refer to the three-legged stool. Through Dr. Clinch's passion I have become convinced that the patients and community benefit directly from there being strength in each leg of the stool.

My background is in one of Ireland's most innovative industries. My colleagues in St. James's Hospital will know that their chairman and board strongly support innovation and change to improve services. Innovation and change must be constant if quality is to be maintained. I will work with the hospital executive leadership to ensure that the culture of the hospital and its partners encourages novel ideas, rewards success and recognises that to succeed an organisation must cherish all attempts at innovation, including those that provide more of a learning opportunity than a success.

While I am clearly excited to take on this position at one of Ireland's health care success stories, the organisation's future still retains a number of challenges as well as opportunities. First, there are significant challenges in providing highly specialist national services while, at the same time, meeting the secondary care needs of an aging and frequently deprived local community.

Second, the new national children's hospital is a critical national project and the successful development and integration of the hospital on the St. James's Hospital campus will be a complex and challenging process. I am mindful and aware of the fact that St. James's Hospital is one of Ireland's clearer success stories of hospital integration and I believe it has the corporate memory to deliver on this vision. Over the span of my career I have become convinced of the key role that information and communications technology investment plays as a key element underpinning successful integration on this scale. A future with adult, children's and maternity care all available on the St. James's Hospital campus offers the unique potential of a care pathway capable of delivering whole-of-life care led from a single campus.

Third, and with more of a focus on opportunity, I will take a moment to discuss scale. Today, St. James's Hospital is already an organisation of scale. With the establishment of the new national children's hospital on campus this will become even more apparent. With such scale comes opportunities to take an all-island shared approach to the provision of highly specialist services, such as the treatment of rare diseases, including rare cancers, where critical mass is key to best outcomes. Such scale provides a platform to strengthen our partnerships with existing partners, such as our academic partner, Trinity College, Dublin, as well as to forge important new partnerships with commercial and philanthropic organisations.

It is important for the committee to understand some context within which this appointment will be made. First, I mentioned earlier that this was an exciting time for the hospital. I wish to draw the committee's attention to the fact that in addition to appointing a new chairman to the hospital board, the hospital is also appointing a new chief executive, Lorcan Birthistle. Mr. Birthistle is a highly experienced acute hospital chief executive with an excellent track record in the leadership and management of complex organisational change. He will take up his post at the end of this month and I am looking forward to a close working relationship with him.

Second, today St. James's Hospital is already an exceptionally well-run hospital. There is a strong senior management team in place with an enviable track record. They are managing an organisation as it delivers safe timely care to a high-quality standard. Along the way they are also acting robustly to mitigate the complex financial, corporate and clinical risks that exist in every health care environment.

St. James's Hospital is fortunate that over the years it has built a well-aligned highly committed team at all levels. Every day, staff at St. James's Hospital display a can-do attitude and look to go the extra mile for the hospital and its patients. I am looking forward to playing my small part in its future. I thank the Chairman and committee members for their attention during my presentation and I am happy to take any questions the committee may have.