Ms Laura Magahy:

Project 3 is about streamlining care pathways from prevention to discharge. Many of these examples have been demonstrated well over the past two years through some of the samples on which Ms Harlin spoke. Developing integrated care pathways that are based on delivering the best outcomes for patients can help drive streamlined integration between the care settings. Pathways will be agreed between GPs, primary community care providers, community specialist teams, and hospital-based specialists. They will provide better links across these care settings, ensuring resources are used to provide care for people in a timely way. This has been recently proven in New Zealand in an innovative way. It will be enabled by a decision support tool and other e-health projects, and backed up by a services directory. There is great demand for this, particularly in areas where there are problems of referral, for example, in mental health. We will work with colleagues to implement that over the next three years.

Our next project in reform programme 1 is on developing the elective centres. As members will know from our previous meeting, the development of elective hospital facilities in Dublin, Cork and Galway is in line with the National Development Plan 2018-2027 and health service capacity review and it was recommitted to in the programme for Government. The goal of the project is to develop elective hospital capacity with a ten-year horizon of need. This facilitates the separation of scheduled and unscheduled care. It will provide quicker, higher quality, safer care for selected elective patients. It will create capacity for acute hospital sites and reduce or eliminate outlier orders, that is, people waiting on trolleys. It will help drive down waiting lists, reduce cancellations and reduce acute hospital footfall. The project continues to work at the moment under the previous implementation strategy. The elective hospitals oversight group, which is under the joint governance of the HSE, the Department of Health and Sláintecare, is guiding the development of the elective hospital sites. We followed the process outlined in the public spending code. We have completed a strategic assessment report. As of last Friday, we had invited sites for selection. They will be considered by the oversight group in the next phase of the implementation of the elective hospitals. The goal is, in accordance with the public spending code, to bring for a Government decision before the summer the selection of sites for the elective hospitals.

We have been working closely with colleagues in Cork and Galway in particular to make sure their requirements can be met within this programme. The next slide is on implementing a multi-annual waiting lists plan.