Ms Laura Magahy:

We will forward the slides afterwards. For anybody watching at home, we will put them on our website.

This is an important programme around waiting lists. Waiting lists have been exacerbated by the Covid-19 experience. We report on waiting lists monthly and they have been getting worse as a result of cancellation of operations due to Covid-19. Together with our colleagues in the HSE and the National Treatment Purchase Fund, NTPF, we are developing a multi-annual waiting list plan to get rid of waiting lists over a four to five-year period. It will not just be about hospital waiting lists. There are waiting lists in the community as well. It will be about acute, community, social care, disabilities, mental health, palliative care, rehabilitation and any other waiting lists that exist. We are at an advanced stage and will present our project to the Minister for Health to see if the Government will commit to a multi-annual plan to get rid of waiting lists once and for all. Traditionally, waiting lists have been dealt with on an annual basis only. We need a longer-term view in order to drive these down. It is what people care about most. It will be the barometer for the success of Sláintecare.

Over the last four months, we have put a lot of work into developing this plan. It is complex and there are a lot of moving parts. It will require joined-up thinking. Some of the projects to which we alluded form part of this plan. I am happy to come back to the committee to discuss the details of the plan, once it has been approved by the Government.

On the next slide, the e-health programme is a critical part of reforming the health service. Through the pandemic we saw the impact of some positive initiatives in e-health, for example, remote consultations and, to a limited but successful degree, electronic prescribing. The benefits of e-health have been demonstrated, as have the risks through the recent cyberattack. It is necessary to invest into the basics of our e-health programme, as well as into the more advanced pieces.

The projects listed on this slide are an example of some of the key health solutions and electronic health record, EHR, component parts, which will be needed to deliver an electronic health record for every patient in Ireland. In the middle, there is the citizen portal, the individual health identifier interoperability, the shared care record, and the integrated referral and wait lists hub. These will be facilitated on one side by e-prescribing, immunisation, home support and community programmes. On the other side, it will be supported by our hospital-based programmes.

We have some very good examples of EHR in the maternity newborn programme. We also have advanced level EHR in hospitals such as St. James’s Hospital. The National Forensic Mental Health Service Hospital and Children's Hospital Ireland will have one in due course. This slide underpins everything we do in Sláintecare. Some key advances have been made in recent months. In particular, everybody who has had a vaccination has now been allocated an individual health identifier. This is an essential part of the shared care record. They will soon form part of general practice and the hospital patient administration system, which is necessitated to deliver a summary and shared care record.

On the next slide, the project on removing private care from public hospitals is a key part of Sláintecare and the original Oireachtas committee report. The new Sláintecare contract with an increased salary over existing new entry levels will support the expansion of the public health service in line with Sláintecare. It is a key step in the move towards the long-term goal of universal single-tier healthcare, with public hospitals exclusively used for the treatment of public patients. That has been a long-standing aim. It is the first step on the road to separate private and public health care. The OECD, in its analysis for the de Buitléar group, whose report gave rise to this, concluded that removing private practice from public hospitals would eliminate the unequal treatment of public and private patients in public hospitals. We are at the stage of entering discussions with the representative bodies and we look forward to concluding those in the coming months.

We have just described reform programme 1. Everything within reform programme 1 has been designed to reduce waiting lists and improve access for public patients. On the next slide, reform programme 2 takes a slightly different slant, which is about addressing health inequalities. We need investment in the public system, but there are also pockets of places where people have unequal access. Therefore, the four projects that are listed here are designed to ensure that resources are more equally distributed and are targeted to address and reduce health inequalities. This is like the Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools, DEIS, school idea. There are four projects here. The first is developing a citizen care master plan. The second is rolling out healthy communities, which is a very exciting initiative. The third is developing regional health areas. It was parked last year during Covid-19 but it is on the cards again. The fourth project is about implementing the obesity policy and action plan. I invite Ms Treleaven to outline the citizen care master plan project.