Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

At one stage, going back to Anne Counihan's time, the NTMA was quite involved in giving the HSE advice on capital spending, about the purchasing of up to date technical equipment such as high level imaging. In effect, the NTMA was carrying out a kind of value for money analysis and seeing if it could be done on a regional basis. At the moment there are problems in quite a significant part of the country, first, where pregnant women do not get scans at 20 weeks and, second, where the more modern technology which is available in the private sector in Ireland for blood tests for issues a baby might have at around 11 or 12 weeks of gestation is not available. Is any of that still being done by NTMA? That work was very useful because it allowed evaluations on a regional basis, as happened in Waterford or Mayo at the time, and equipment which was maybe a couple of million euro or up to a couple of million was not that dear, in conjunction with some of the hospital developments.

Going back to capital development, we have a situation in the HSE where a lot of its capital equipment is older and it needs a strong cycle of renewal. Is that capacity still there to resume that work?