Colette Kelleher (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Yes, absolutely, but the true role of charities is advocacy and innovation. They are things the State may not always be willing to do. If more charities could be in that space, there would be a healthy tension between the citizen and the State rather than the State becoming a service provider by default because there is nothing else out there.

In terms of area planning, we could spend years deciding what structures to base things on. I often think, and the articles I quoted by Mintzberg support this, that a lot of time can be spent getting into structures, reorganisations, new logos and new this, that and the other, and this takes away from the energy of doing the work because at the end of the day, whatever the size of the population, people have to work together.

The new community health care organisations are a good starting point. It causes some amusement that community health care organisation area 4 looks a lot like the Southern Health Board of old, so we will kind of go back to the future. I would not get too caught up in that. They need to be sufficiently localised to connect with people. They should not be too remote. Within a community health care organisation, there could be clusters but the voice of the citizen has to be active and not just an afterthought. It should be driving them and having these kinds of conversations directly with commissioners and providers of organisations.

That is what the NHS Citizen project is about. It is about enabling the citizen, provider and commissioner to have these conversations. Very often when we have the citizen meeting the health provider, it is in a situation of frustration and anger. Those conversations are very understandable but they often do not go anywhere because the provider gets entrenched and hides away or the citizen is so cross they cannot bear to talk. It is not just the "what" of the planning forum but also how they operate. They need to be on a statutory basis. The homeless forums were great but they came and went. Does that answer the Chairman's question?