Neasa Hourigan (Dublin Central, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I want to move on to access to echocardiograms. I am sure the witnesses are all aware of the Croí report put out in the last two weeks, which showed that 80% of public hospitals do not offer a direct line from a GP to an echocardiogram, so people have to wait for six to 12 months, if they are lucky, to be referred to a cardiologist in a public outpatient clinic. This obviously puts more pressure on our outpatient clinics when what we could do is have a cardiac physiologist take on the echocardiograms and shortcut that. My question is for both groups. First, are we doing that and who is responsible for that? Second, there seems to be an issue around training and ensuring that the training needed for echocardiograms is fully integrated with the cardiac physiologist training. I am trying to understand who is responsible for this, who is responsible for setting up the referral pathways and who is responsible for ensuring that the training is correct and that the number of staff available is correct.