Mr. Peter Collins:

I thank Senator Daly. It is good to know first of all that people are actually taking notice of the NVPS. I welcome that. Second, I will just say that the development of the NVPS is part of the Article 57 requirement whereby member states must submit data on sales usage and actual usage of antimicrobials in the member states.

Part of the solution that has also been developed is to introduce competition for all prescriptions across the market in Ireland. It is hoped that all stakeholders will remain within the sector and be able to buy their medicines wherever they wish to get them. That provides greater choice for farmers in the area of where they can get those medicines from. That is in development. That is what we are hoping to achieve in developing the system.

As the Senator said, some veterinarians have been saying they will not go live and are not buying into it. We have had multiple stakeholder engagements. I know Dr. Corkery mentioned stakeholder engagements but, again, this is across the sector. We have spoken to licensed merchants, co-operatives and multiple feed mills in the last week or two. We have had focus groups with all the veterinarians. A number of veterinarians are developing their own systems as well and we are trying to integrate the system with those at the same time. Veterinary Ireland has been in as part of the procedure of looking at the system we have developed to date.

At the moment, it is a free-to-use software solution. It will be an app or a tablet. We are currently not installing any software into practices. They will be able to download and use the app themselves. We know that 82% of veterinarians out there are not currently using prescription software to generate prescriptions in the market, although 18% of them are. We are looking at providing the system and hope to have it go live in late January-early February. People will be able to log on to the system. Many veterinarians were working with software companies in the background. These are veterinary software companies. We are also talking to the dispensing software companies about their point of sale software. It is, therefore, all quite complex in trying to get the integration. If veterinarians are using the software providers they have at the moment, they will not know that they are interacting with the NVPS system. The integration will be going on in the background. Similarly, when the point of sale software is loading and when they log on at their front end, it will bring back the information into their front-end system. They will not, therefore, know they are logging onto the NVPS system at the time they are actually using it. We are, therefore, well advanced in the development of the system.

I know the Senator said they have not been buying in but they have all been engaging with us in the development and testing of the system. We are hoping to carry out testing of certain elements of the system in terms of the prescription and dispensing modules and search elements in the next four weeks. We hope certainly to go live at the end of January. At the moment, we are considering the transition phase. We are at that cliff edge where if we just shut off all paper scripts, which are currently in use, it might not be the best practice. We are, therefore, looking at introducing a temporary transition phase where people will be able to transition to the electronic system and similarly use the paper system at the same time.