Mr. Derek Tierney:

On electronic health records, EHR, and as I said in my opening statement, CHI has now signed a contract with a vendor, Epic, and it is starting the deployment of an electronic health record system for the new children's hospital. This ultimately means the delivery of a paediatric model of care in a paperless environment. The deployment of EHR on the campus is not a first. We have reached somewhere between 50% and 70% of deployment of electronic health records for national newborn and maternity systems. We have also deployed electronic health records for the National Rehabilitation Hospital and the National Forensic Mental Health Service facility in Portrane. We are also now considering how best to deploy electronic health records as we start to mobilise regional health areas.

How can we truly deliver integrated services from a community and an acute perspective? How can we integrate these elements? What will this mean for patients as they journey through the healthcare continuum? There are issues and challenges, of course. These have been well noted, and include legacy systems and fragmentation of systems. The real challenge, however, concerns how we can integrate systems from a technical perspective. We are now starting to turn our minds to consideration of what this level of capability means for our regional health areas. Obviously, institutional and cultural issues will be encountered as we move from paper to electronic records. The Government has approved the heads of a health information Bill to allow the Department to progress this process. For the first time, this will provide absolute clarity around two purposes of information sharing. The first would be deemed the primary purpose, and this refers to ensuring patients' data follow them. This would be the case whether the healthcare setting concerned is private, public or community practice. The proposed Bill will clarify patients' entitlement to their data and how they can receive them. The second purpose, which is important from a health planning perspective, is to allow the use of patient data at an aggregate level to plan for future needs. It will mean that as we are planning for our future health capacity and needs we will have data and evidence to give us insights regarding what we need to do, when and where.

Turning to the issue of the parking charge, the Minister has decided to cap the daily parking charge at €10. We are working with the HSE to see how we can best institute this charge in the context of a procurement process to engage a provider to run and manage this contract on behalf of the State.

I turn now to the last element of the question and I will add to Mr. Devine's commentary on transport planning. Regarding how staff and patients access the existing campus, there are already strong links between St. James's Hospital and the NTA, through engagement with Dublin Bus and the operator of the Luas, concerning how to best match transport capacity to the needs of the campus. CHI is also active in this discussion in the context of understanding what it means in terms of being able to rely on public transport to access the site. Extensive parking is also being provided underground to facilitate parents as they arrive with children for treatment. This is all part of a wider transport planning consideration.