Dr. Ronan Fawsitt:

We have a GP-led gynaecology clinic. We are changing the culture slowly.

Deputy O'Connell also asked about community pharmacists. Community pharmacists keep me out of the High Court day and night. I get many phone calls, but I will always take calls from community pharmacists because I value them. We need to improve our links with community pharmacists and work with them. We need to stop treating them as enemies. They are our colleagues and they help us. Last year, we started to involve them in a liaison process. We have not continued that to the extent that we would like. From that process, we developed in the hospital a medicines management process involving community pharmacists, hospital pharmacists and GPs, with the aim of improving the quality of discharge prescribing. We got funding from the Ireland East Hospitals Group. We evaluated that process after a year.

HIQA now sets standards of care for hospital prescribing, discharge prescribing and complex care. In a single year, we went from meeting 40% of HIQA's targets to meeting 100% of its targets. We believe the quality of this expensive and costly process keeps readmissions down. We cannot prove that yet because we have just started the process. We are working with community pharmacists, hospitals and GPs to improve the process as we go along. I would love to see the day when community pharmacists will be involved in the local integrated care committee process. That day should not be too far off. It will take time for this to happen, but it should not take too much time because it is sensible.