Mr. Derek Tierney:

That allowed us and the then Department of Public Expenditure and Reform to engage on a business case for a national EHR deployment, as we are required to do under the public spending code. There was an engagement around scale, complexity and affordability. We do not have a blank cheque. We have to live within our own constraints and funding is one of our constraints. Part of that discussion was understanding that the ambition was to deploy EHRs in the children's hospital. We needed to look for a way not to necessarily decouple but to stage a phased implementation or deploy EHRs in the children's hospital and then understand what the bigger picture looks like. Since then, we have had a pandemic and a cyberattack. We have not necessarily or slavishly followed the advice to wait. As to what we have done, we have deployed EHRs in maternity settings. Today, 40% of all new births are captured and registered with an EHR.