Mr. John Horan:

I am very happy to take it. We made a detailed submission to the Committee on the Future of Healthcare and I was pleased to see some of our thinking coming through in sections of the report, particularly sections on the continued use of measures such as maximum wait times to ensure patients are treated within pre-agreed timelines and so on. If, as the committee report very clearly does, one sets out a maximum wait of 15 weeks for inpatient, ten weeks for outpatient and ten days for diagnostics, one is going to need some way of measuring it. One is going to need somebody to keep the score. THE NTPF is particularly well-placed and that is what we do. We gather information from all the hospitals and we validate it. There were a number of points there, including extending the concept of maximum waiting times for hospital treatment to cover primary and community-based services, for example, and again we are well-placed there. We are a strong and independent agency so we can ensure that kind of data and information is available because if one is going to try to implement that system, one needs somebody to keep check.

I will address the final matter, which was in appendix 4 to the committee's report on the waiting list management. The Chairman referred to this earlier in the context of the National Cancer Registry Board and this is the whole issue of e-health, waiting lists and using e-systems, including services like a patient portal where people can go straight on and look at their own referral, status and position on the waiting list. That is good. I do not want to keep harking back but we had a system previously that worked very well where, if a person was on a waiting list for more than three months, he or she could ring the NTPF lo-call number, we took their details and straight away we would go and arrange the person's treatment in a private hospital. This is a further extension of that.

Very often, part of the suffering of being on a waiting list is not knowing where one is on the waiting list, for example, am I No. 99 or No. 599? Reminder services by text, integrated referral management systems, and digital discharge solutions can all help, as can, to get back to Deputy Louise O'Reilly's point, a single integrated hospital waiting list management system. These are all the sort of things that the NTPF has the experience of having done, can make better and can be part of the future. I am pleased to see the report and I am pleased to see a general cross-party approach being taken to it so that we do not start chopping and changing, because we have suffered from that in the past.