Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will share out the questions but I will take two of them.

The Deputy is right to highlight the issue of the assessment of need waiting lists and I know she has been highlighting it for quite a period of time. Ms Anne O'Connor might add further detail but from my perspective, the fact that following negotiation and engagement with Fianna Fáil we have allocated funding for 100 additional therapy posts in 2019, along with some of the work the HSE is doing in reforming the assessment of need processes, will make a real and meaningful difference. We will obviously be cognisant of allocating them to areas of particular and specific need through the service planning process. I will not carry out the service plan here but it will obviously look at areas where there are particular acute problems and the Deputy has referenced the area of Cork. That will be factored in as we work out where to allocate those 100 additional therapy posts in 2019.

On Respreeza, I am glad the Deputy brought it up. Deputy Kelly also brought it up before I arrived and I caught a little bit of what he said. There are two issues here. There is the issue of the general reimbursement of the drug, which I will put to one side because it is a matter for the drug company to put in an application and go through the legal reimbursement process for which the HSE has responsibility. There is another issue that is more acute in my view and is also more of an ethical issue, namely, that there are about 19 patients who are on what was in my view a long-term compassionate access clinical trial-type programme. That support was pulled from them very quickly. It was not handled very well by the company and it knows my views on that. The HSE has been engaging intensively to try to provide a certainty for those 19 people and I am confident that in the next few days the HSE will bring that to a conclusion and I thank the executive for the hard work it has been doing on that. It has also taken the unusual but appropriate step of providing some of the cost of administering the drug through nurses and the likes in the interim period. I am hopeful for a resolution for those 19 people in the coming days and I emphasise the word "days."

On FreeStyle Libre, as is a matter for the HSE's reimbursement process, its representatives might wish to comment but as the Deputy rightly says, it is available to children in hospitals at the moment. It is about six months of the way through a 12-month evaluation process so if we do not have the information here we may come back to the Deputy with a note. A parliamentary question tabled on it is down to be answered today as well.

On the Ombudsman, it is appropriate that the director general would respond as it was a report to the HSE. Like the Deputy, I noted that there were a number of areas where the Ombudsman welcomed significant progress and others where there is still work to do. The HSE may tell the committee where it is in that regard.