Professor David Keegan:

Ashgrove House is a facility under the governance of CHO 9. In the service level agreement with the Mater hospital, we were able to create a Mater-based clinic at Ashgrove House. It is a community facility just off the Navan Road in Dublin. Other CHO 9 activity is done there. We have taken some space and we have been able to use it. We sought to look at it as a model for the use of CHO space in other regions throughout the country. It comes back to the issue of IT connectivity, which is crucial. Getting this fixed will allow it to ramp up. This project has identified the correct model but we need it to run at full speed to have the true impact we think it can have.

I want to revert to the Deputy's previous question. There are very good committed staff in place in CHO 1 and CHO 8. As Dr. Rogers said, the initial pilot programme that he and colleagues from CHO 6 and CHO 7 came in under, which was sponsored and supported by the national clinical programme and the clinical lead, sought to start off, demonstrate and prove the model.

Now they have done that, there is a catch-up piece for the other CHOs as their staff come on board. One of the metrics we look at in our tracker is those unfilled posts, to make sure that we keep pressure on ourselves and on the local units to fill those posts when they are approved.