Dr. Eddie Casey:

As the Chairman stated, one of our findings when we considered health is that there is a significant lack of information on key matters that would be needed to assess issues such as identifying what bang you are getting for your buck, as they say. What we want are age and gender specific outcomes in terms of how patients come out of the service, what are their health outcomes and is it improving the general state of the population such that people are in better health, living healthier and able to work more productively and everyone is benefiting from that. We cannot say whether that is the case.

When we looked at line-by-line spending items in health, we saw some areas where there are data on this, but the level of data is nowhere near where it ought to be. We are hoping to publish our first statement of data needs early next year. It is a report we are planning that will consider in what kind of areas data are missing. We know there are areas such as health and public sector pensions in terms of the broader accrual-based general government data that we would like to see in order to be able to do our job properly. These are areas in which we know there have been long-standing issues and we would like to see them improved. It would allow for the type of analysis to which the Chairman refers.