Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Anti-Austerity Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I thank Mr. Corbridge and Ms Goff for very interesting documentation and their presentation. I have two questions. One relates to the issue of electronic referrals from GPs and the other relates to the savings identified by the lighthouse projects. With regard to the electronic referrals by GPs, perhaps I got the information wrong, in which case the witnesses might correct me, but my understanding is the programme has been rolled out over the past 12 months and there is a 40% take-up. The witnesses are predicting that by April of next year we will have reached the target of 100%. I hope they are right but I want to ask what are the grounds for their confidence. If it has gone from zero to 40% in that period, unless there is an increased take-up, we are looking at a percentage in the low 60s by April of next year. I would imagine that, in a situation like this, there would probably be one third of GP practices that would take to it like a duck to water and buy in fairly quickly. Once they were on board, however, it would begin to get tougher and, in the normal scheme of things, one would expect it to slow down somewhat. There is also the age profile of GPs. It is not the laptop generation. I can think of GPs who I would imagine will be slow to move from paper to electronic referral. My own doctor has an electronic referral system but that is not the case with other GPs I know. On what is the idea based that we will be at 100% by April of next year?

The savings identified by the lighthouse projects are €5 million next year on epilepsy and €20 million over three years on the haemophilia sector. I would like to hear a breakdown, not to the nearest euro but in broad percentage terms, as to where those savings are coming from. I have listened to various points in the presentation and during the questions, so I can see mobile phones are one area for savings, given a lot of money was previously spent on phone calls. There will be savings on drugs, as was indicated in regard to the genomic sequencing for epilepsy. Is that part of the savings that are identified here? What about labour costs? I can imagine there will be a need for fewer people to do the work once the IT systems are in place but surely that would not be a saving to the health service in the sense that people are not being made redundant and they would be transferred to other work. Is the HSE counting the fact they are working in other sectors as part of the savings? How do the savings break down?