Mr. Muiris O'Connor:

I thank the Deputy for those questions. I will pass the questions on open disclosure and the licensing of hospitals to Dr. Kathleen MacLellan but, first, I acknowledge that the Deputy has raised good points on the responsibility of administrators and managers in health care settings to make better use of information. I would say that is the key motivation for the health information aspects of the current Bill.

The current situation is one of fragmented data sources, different computer systems with little interoperability and awful lot of paper that goes missing. These deficiencies raise direct patient safety challenges and they do not service the needs of our clinicians, as the Deputy said, in their administration of care in a professional way to citizens and to patients. I refer to the provisions around ensuring best practice, as overseen by HIQA in the management of data, in the electronic exchange of data, and the Minister's facilities to prescribe data-matching programmes and health information resources which would operate to very high standards. These would be a small number of key national programmes that would underpin a much more robust and much more accurate and available information base that would be the responsibility of administrators and managers to maintain and to execute. That is a key motivation here, that the clinicians and the health and social care professional be supported.