Professor Steve Thomas:

That is an interesting debate. I am not sure we spend the money well in some cases. We also push back some expenditures onto the private sector. There are incentive structures. We often have a significant amount of dual practice, which can create problems through the different incentives.

I want to come back to the issue of how we manage this problem because we do not have very good information on waiting times. While we have data on waiting lists, we do not have very good waiting time data. If we get much more detailed information on waiting times for various procedures in different parts of the country and make that publicly available, politicians can be empowered to start doing something about it. It is much more difficult to do something to identify the problem when it is hidden behind bad data. What Sláintecare does is provide important investment in ehealth and some of these data systems. Once the truth starts to come out, it will be much easier to manage it better.