Dr. John O'Brien:

I thank Deputy Donnelly. The first one he raised was the question of the timeline and we were all aware that the Minister has it in mind that the service would commence in the beginning of January. There are three work streams involved in this process. There is the legislation, which will be the responsibility of the Oireachtas. There are the structural implications, that is to say the provision of services either within secondary care or within primary care and the pathways that have been spoken about, where a woman needs a particular course of action to be taken - will that be there for that woman in an expeditious way? All of that needs to be worked out and to date we are not that far advanced in that side of things. On the ICGP, our role in this will involve the production of guidelines and the education of our members and we have done considerable work on our guidelines to date but they will intersect with the legislation and with the structural arrangements that will be put in place. In order for us to finalise that we need to have some knowledge of what else is happening in the three work streams.

Education will be another part. This is a new service being introduced which we have not had in Ireland before. We said in our statement that people will be unfamiliar and will need guidelines and educational input to reinforce that. We will probably do that in a web-based fashion but we also have an infrastructure of study groups around the country. Our continuing medical education, CME, group infrastructure which the committee might be aware of, where GPs gather together and discuss issues will probably be used. We will also probably be looking to roll out more regional presentations as well so all of this will be a rolling process. Whether we will have enough time for all of this between now and January is the question. I do not really have the answer to that because I do not know how far advanced people will be in the provision of the infrastructure and I do not know how far advanced the Dáil will be with regard to the legislation itself.