Ms Colette Cowan:

No. We attend on a monthly basis to give them that courtesy. These people are doing it voluntarily so we give them the courtesy of performance details. Regarding autonomy, as CEOs we are key decision makers. We are the accountable officers for everything that happens in our hospital group. We are held to account through a very strong performance accountability framework. There are areas that we have to account up to. Mr. Liam Woods is our national director. Sometimes, we would like more of the decision making to be with us at the front line. We are not anywhere near moving to a trust status. We support a network of hospitals working together and that has played out with some of the positives around reconfiguration which predates groups. In UL that was driven by this gentleman here beside me, Dr. Paul Burke. We have to train our people to understand how to work like private sector business model units. We are public servants and we are here to serve the patients. I suggest that groups evolve as networks of hospitals working together, moving surgery out to the sites and moving work around rather than moving very quickly into a trust style model where we will not be able to account for every last detail. That is my suggestion on it.

Regarding IT systems we have just rolled out a patient master index across six hospital sites which is the first in the country. That was managed centrally through the office of the CIO, chief information officer. He got funding and has continued to get funding for IT services, which has been very effective because we can transfer patients now across the six sites and everybody can look in and see what that looks like. It was managed centrally but we had teams of project people on the ground delivering that. Mr. Maurice Power might want to talk a bit about his electronic patient record. He is trying to look at rolling that out and we would copy the system rather than every group trying to do something different. That is under way.

Regarding equipment and purchasing, we hold an asset register so all equipment belongs to the HSE. The leasing model is in place in small areas. The vascular team have leased equipment and sometimes that works. We are trying to have economies of scale so if we are ordering equipment for groups of hospitals we can do better deals on equipment rather than us all going out and spending enormous amounts of money belonging to the public purse on it. We work on that.