David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Dr. Kennan and her colleagues. There is real frustration that we have been discussing these issues for the best part of ten years, and possibly longer. As was outlined, there have been numerous reports advocating changes in this area, such as in respect of the use of unique patient identifiers, electronic patient records and better integrating IT systems across healthcare for all the reasons the witnesses have outlined. We have to call out where the failure lies and that is a political failure. If a Minister does not drive this - there is no policy priority coming from this Minister and, I would argue, successive Ministers - we will fall behind. We are light years away from where we need to be. We have to keep putting the spotlight on this issue. In the context of the witnesses' ask of the committee, the members of which operate in the health space on a continuous basis and are involved in many different debates, this is front and centre in terms of many of those issues.

Dr. Kennan gave a human example earlier. From our perspective as Oireachtas Members, we can give examples of the frustration of being unable to access data and the reasons we are given for that. We regularly table parliamentary questions seeking data and one of the responses we often receive is that the system does not capture the data. Another is that as there are multiple systems operating across different elements of the health service and those systems are not aligned, it is not possible to provide the data a Deputy is seeking. That is what we get back in response to many parliamentary questions seeking even basic data.

I refer to an important and fundamental point that was made. Dr. White may wish to take this one. Dr. Kennan referred to the need for a national electronic health record to enable research from the very start. If we do not have that, we are not enabling research from the get-go simply because we do not have the systems to capture it. I ask Dr. White to outline, from a research perspective first, the added value having these systems in place would bring to his work and that of his colleagues.