Dr. Margo Wrigley:

The Deputy is eliciting a high emotional response in me because our hearts are broken trying to get a system in place to collect data. What we are working off at the moment are Excel sheets. Essentially, we are looking at who comes in and who goes out. It is a completely inadequate system and we have been working on it since we started. Dr. Niazi has been wonderful in supporting us in trying to get a bespoke data system. We would like it to have a unique patient identifier number, obviously without knowing the patient's name, so that we could follow the patient's clinical pathway from start to finish. This would enable us to know how and why they came in, what sort of help was provided for them and by whom, what sort of an outcome they had and, very importantly, what they thought about what they were offered by the service. We were making some headway with that until the cyberattack happened and then progress went backwards.

Due to the concern about a further cyberattack, a tight process is in place and we are not allowed to look at a bespoke data system at all. We are looking at alternatives and most recently, as Dr. Niazi knows, we set up a little subcommittee within our perinatal world to look at the data we are collecting and refine it. We now have a link in with the National Perinatal Epidemiology Centre in University College Cork. It already collects data for the national women and infants health programme on things like perinatal deaths, brain cooling and so on and because it is already involved with the HSE, we can use the centre. We hope to be able to provide better data but we will still not be able to provide the unique patient identifier and, therefore, it is still not enough. We absolutely need that because unless we have data like that, we do not know whether we are doing the right thing or not. We hope we are. We talk to women and we have a project in place where we will get feedback from women. Parts of the system like the Coombe Women's Hospital did a study looking at feedback from women accessing their perinatal mental health service, but we need to have a whole-system view of it so we can get exactly that data. We would welcome the Deputy's support on that.