Mr. Fintan Hourihan:

It is the dentists who face a burden. It will be pretty straightforward for the patient but the dentist faces a number of obstacles. As was explained, there will be some presentations where the dentist will say that a patient needs a particular treatment or a certain treatment is recommended, but he or she needs to get what is known as prior approval or permission from the HSE dental team and must supply a lot of documentation to support it. That is not something which applies ordinarily. The administrative difficulties tend to be in the context of form-filling and claims that are submitted for payment, rejected and then appealed. There is a strong sense of unnecessary bureaucratic overload with the scheme, which is one of the reasons we think that an entirely new approach is required. To clarify, we are saying that the administrative overload is from the perspective of the dentist rather than that of the patient.