Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The implementation group is a wide group of stakeholders. If we are talking about creating a single management structure for the patient pathway from the home through to the acute, from cradle to grave as it were, there are many stakeholders. There is the Sláintecare programme team, which has been doing much of the policy work. There are myself and the Cabinet, senior officials in the Department and senior officials in the HSE. There are many different people involved in this, but certainly all the conversations I had in the Department, politically, with the HSE and, indeed, on the front lines are for a very strong buy-in to integrated care, which is what this is all about. The problem has been that, for example, the community does not have funding for a home care package so somebody has to stay in hospital, which is bad for the patient and bad for the hospital.