Mr. Damien McCallion:

I might take a couple of points broadly and my colleagues Mr. Forbes and Mr. Guckian might come in as well.

On the learning and going back to the Departments and the Ministers, we are comprised of the partners that deliver care on the front line but we work closely with the Departments to try to influence policy. On the INTERREG EU projects, there must be an element of innovation. It cannot just be doing what you are doing, so we are always trying new things. I will give one example to illustrate. Community paramedics are a new development Mr. Forbes spearheaded in a former role. The ambulance services could go out on call from GPs or from 999 and were not obliged to necessarily take patients to hospital. They were trained to a higher level. That was piloted in Donegal, Monaghan and Tyrone. We also worked with Scotland as the training and education was done there. It was a very innovative type of project. We take that sort of learning back into our respective service planning or annual processes with the Departments if we feel it has been successful. Mr. Forbes might talk about the evaluations and some of that in a moment.

On the timelines from the PEACE PLUS programme, we are fairly confident. We do not have a specific timeline on it but in talking with the CEO of the special EU programmes body, SEUPB, she is confident we will be moving to calls at some stage later this year. We have been doing a huge amount of work to try to build up what we see as our priorities around the Border region with colleagues in both Northern Ireland and the Republic to look at how those joint projects can work. They might be initiatives where patients move, clinicians move or just where there is learning between the two jurisdictions from doing something together and learning from each other even though both may have different regulatory positions and so on. We are optimistic. At the moment we do not see that being an issue for us. We do not have an exact date but from talking to the SEUPB it is confident we will probably be going for calls later this year. For the last 12 months we have, believe it or not, been working to build up those proposals because it takes a huge amount of time to get all the partners to the same place, ensure the priorities are the same, ensure there is good clinical buy-in and good support around it. There is, therefore, a huge amount of work Mr. Forbes and the team facilitate between the partners. I worked on it in the HSE, so we know those things take time. We have been working actively on those for the last 12 months.

I ask Mr. Guckian to talk about the Western Health and Social Care Trust. He probably has a closer handle on that than do I. We will come back to some of the other questions on GPs and health and well-being. I ask Bill to come back on some of that.