Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I thank Mr. Kearns for his presentation. I am sure that the Vice Chair, as the only other member of this committee who was a member of the Committee on the Future of Healthcare, will recall that this issue was the most dominant issue for that committee over the 11 months that it existed. It was the issue of most concern not only to members of the committee but also to patient groups, staff groups, etc. I refer to the disconnection between the two elements of the acute services and community services. There was a real determination on the part of all of the members of that committee to address the matter because one cannot achieve integrated care unless one does so.

There are three key elements in the recommendations about RHAs that were made by the committee. First, there was the integration piece and how barriers between the sectors should be removed.

Key to that was a call for a single budget and a single management team within each RHA. The second element was that resources would be based on the local population and the weighted population, given the socio-economic profile, age, rurality and factors like that, and that we would move towards a kind of population-based resource allocation, so that there would not be a variation in services across the country. The third element was legal accountability for the spending of the budgets and the provision of services and that that legal accountability would apply to both administrative and clinical management. Are those three elements still intact and is there buy-in to ensure those three elements actually happen?