Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Both Mr. Watt and I know that the Government acts on recommendations from the witnesses. If an expert report says something, that is generally what the Government adopts. There generally is no push back. Can the witnesses please furnish that memorandum in its entirety or redacted? The mid-west and we as its elected representatives need to know what is the logic and what metric has been used to determine one place needs an elective hospital and the mid-west does not. I ask Mr. Watt to send that on to us and who reported that. We need to know that.

I will move on. Often before we meet the witnesses in this committee we get telephone calls from front-line people in the healthcare service. I took a call this morning from one of these individuals when I was travelling up on the train. I will leave it as vague as that. He claimed one of the cruxes of the problem of integrated healthcare and Sláintecare is the lack of information sharing. We have a fascination with staffing and hospital structures, and I have been talking about that for the last few minutes, but he said the information sharing is chronic at times and that sometimes when referrals are made, dates of birth are missing or there is no knowledge of siblings. He also told me, and this was news to me and I was shocked, that each hospital grouping operates its own discrete information system. If a family with a history of public healthcare and going through the public system in Dublin moves from Dublin to the mid-west, there is not necessarily a transfer of files. Could somebody explain if that is the case and, if so, what remedial action is being taken?

There is one example of somebody who came to my office. The person went through a plethora of tests, everything from blood tests and blood pressure tests to angiograms and so forth, and on the day of discharge a doctor said to the person as the doctor was taking up the chart, "I did not realise until today that you also had cancer two years ago". There is no information sharing. Surely that is an easy thing to reconcile. Staff and hospital buildings are difficult matters, but could somebody please answer on information sharing?