Mr. Derek Tierney:

Good morning Chairman and members. We stood up the call centre using a mixed model of existing call agents across our system. We are also using support from a private partner. As Ms Canavan said, we opened yesterday with 55 staff. We will increase that to 85 by tomorrow and to more than 100 into next week.

In fairness, the Deputy has raised an important point regarding other channels. We did look at email but our agents have functionality to fix queries at source. We can resolve the query at source within the existing HSE data systems rather than just creating another backlog that needs to be resolved. Where we cannot fix data it is escalated to the HSE to resolve.

We hope to launch a recovery portal tomorrow that will allow people to self-serve queries around recovery certificates, and over the coming weeks we will increase additional channels such as SMS, chat, and callback. This will be over the next two to three weeks. Hopefully, this will give other avenues or other channels by which members of the public can engage with the call centre.