Neasa Hourigan (Dublin Central, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I have three questions. I will run through them in order to give the witnesses as much time as possible for answers. The first relates to priority for people who may be under 65 years, those with heart conditions, respiratory illnesses and so on to receive the vaccine. I am trying to understand how vaccines will be administered to these people. It seems that GPs will recommend them to be vaccinated, but we do not have full GP coverage throughout the country. In addition, there will be many who will be in contact with consultants and might not be in regular communication with GPs. Is it the case that GPs must trawl through their own files and then contact people or should those who do not have a GP find one? Should people contact GPs themselves? What is the capacity among GPs in terms of making contact with people? Some have huge numbers of patients in their practice who the may not see that often as those patients mainly deal with consultants. We may not have talked much about the IT system this morning, but I am thinking of GPs' practices and trying to understand the IT set-up, whether the GPs are administering the vaccines themselves or referring patients on.

Also on priority groups, the list puts an order with healthcare workers, front-line workers, special needs assistants, those over 70 years of age and those over 85. There will be thousands of people in some of those groups. Will there be prioritising of vaccinating within those groups, say a healthcare worker with an illness or who is particularly vulnerable? If that is happening, how is it going?

Finally, I have been trying to understand how the IT system will work. From the early system I saw, it seems that people will be required to create a new account for the vaccination process. The MyGovID system is intended to be used for exactly this kind of purpose. In order to avoid the creation and maintenance of yet another single-purpose database containing millions of citizens IDs, will the HSE use the existing MyGovID system as the means to login to the vaccination management system?