Dr. Pádraig McGarry:

There are a lot of questions so I will try to answer the ones that stick in my mind. Primary care teams are a very effective way to deal with patients' problems. The focus to date has been on primary care centres. A primary care team involves the interaction between various health professionals but it does not have to be within the one building. It is something that has been going on for years. We interact with public health nurses and physiotherapists on a daily basis so the concept of interacting and working with primary care teams is nothing new. It is perhaps more formalised in some way but it has been working very well for a long time. Primary care meetings means perhaps setting aside two hours to go through the cases of individual patients. In many cases it was felt that not an awful lot of productivity came out of it. It was more of a box-ticking exercise than actually caring for the patient. If I need to deal with a particular patient, I will liaise with the public health nurse, the physiotherapist or the OT and sort it out. It is usually done through a phone call. We do not have to be in the same room to do that nor do we have to be in the same building. I do not think there is a reluctance to deal with primary care teams. It has been going on for years and I do not see why that would change.