Kate O'Connell (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Yes, but as Dr. Short said, the choice element is fundamental to a woman's healthcare. While the evidence all suggests that the lower the user input, the more efficacious a product is and that we have far more success with long-acting reversible contraceptives, the fact is, as all the experts here know, at different stages in their lives women might choose an oral contraceptive pill at the start as there is a familiarity with it. I would like to see a point arrive where everybody is familiar with a long-acting reversible contraceptive but we are a while off that. There are psychological barriers to it and there might be issues where one might only need a contraceptive for a short time. It is far more complex, as the witnesses know, than just horsing a long-acting contraceptive into everybody. If we look at the dispensing data and if we leave cost out of it, a huge cohort of women in Ireland choose the oral contraceptive pill. That might be due to cost, familiarity or because of what is happening in their lives at that particular time. I cannot understand, when we consider the pressure that is on the health service, why we cannot look at this and try to help those women in a community pharmacy setting in order to take some pressure off the GP surgeries. We should move towards educating the next generation of younger girls in the field of long-acting contraceptives such as LARC, the bar in the arm and the Depo injections. I cannot see why there is resistance to that. It almost seems like a turf war in the health service again.