Mr. John Hennessy:

I am getting there. The recommendations of the drugs group come to the leadership team. The deliberations of the HSE as a public body are available as well. The items on the agenda are public knowledge and the decisions taken at those meetings are publicly available and reported on the HSE website. If there are ways to put more transparency around it, we would be happy to explore those and deliberate on them.

Deputy O'Reilly's point goes to the issue of delay or the perception of delay. There is no deliberate slowing down or delay factor coming through the process at our end. What we see and hear about is access in different jurisdictions but, as Mr. Flanagan mentioned, access can mean different things from one jurisdiction to another and it is not always easily comparable.

We aim for a two-fold agenda. We want to ensure access to medicines for Irish patients and to ensure as much value as we can get throughout the process. We have been exploring ways to speed up the processing with the pharmaceutical sector. Those discussions are productive and proactive in fairness to the industry. We have ongoing discussions on the matter. We have put additional resourcing into the process so that we can handle the additional numbers of applications coming through now for reimbursement. It is a two-way process. Getting to the final price is one of the issues we tend to struggle with in dealing with the pharmaceutical sector. We are trying to resolve that as well. Mr. Flanagan mentioned that the list price and the final price can often differ substantially. It is important we get access to drugs. It is also important that we can get value and demonstrate that as well.

Deputy O'Reilly asked about the rare diseases review group and publishing the work programme. I will ask Professor Barry to speak to that point. Deputy O'Reilly also asked about the Scottish experience. We have been examining that closely and we see opportunities there. Some of the steps that have been taken so far this year in response to the committee report are modelled on the Scottish model of transparency and patient involvement. We hope to go further on that as well. Mr. Judge will talk about the BeNeLuxA question and I will bring in Professor Barry on the health technology assessment and patient involvement aspect.