Mr. Paul Reid:

I will make few comments on the various issues raised. My analysis is definitely in line with Sláintecare. I have not invented anything different. However, I have seen a significant amount of innovation all across our acute and community settings. While Sláintecare is a new direction in terms of pathways to care and devolved regions, we can also scale up and roll out much of what is good in our hospital and community settings. I have seen a significant amount of that in terms of emergency departments, process flow, oversight of bed capacity within a unit, electronic monitoring of beds and centrally managed hubs. We can scale up and roll out much of that innovation, on top of the direction of flight of Sláintecare.

We have to scale up better pathways for treatment. That requires more GPs, more primary care investment and more utilisation of pharmacies. I agree about electronic solutions. Electronic health records will take time and investment. We know it works where we have put it in place. There is a shorter pathway we can take, which is to have a shared record of patients' care between the GP and the acute setting the Chairman has been talking about quite a bit. That is an incremental step that we can take in advance of the major investment in the electronic health records.

On budget spend, outcomes and related issues, an OECD report was published in the past couple of weeks. It is quite good and has a synopsis of this. It demonstrates that health expenditure is above the EU per capitaaverage. Life expectancy in Ireland has increased by almost six years since 2000. The report also states that our general public healthcare is comparable with other OECD countries. It highlights some particular issues that we have with obesity and alcohol, and the demands that places on our services. It is a good report and I recommend browsing it. We have a high standard.