Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I could not agree more. Probably the single greatest frustration raised with me by NCHDs are the IT systems. They cannot get their heads around having to queue up to use laptops to access patient files. It makes no sense and it is deeply frustrating for them. It is also frustrating for patients. I was in Canada recently for the St. Patrick's Day period and I spent a good deal of time talking to IT and e-health experts there to see what was being done in the various provinces in that country. The Department has been looking around Europe and the world to see who is the best at this. Turning to the Deputy's point as to whether we can get things done quickly, yes we can. The way we can get things done quickly is to break this up into different projects. There is a big project where we would choose the likes of Epic or Cerner, the big electronic health records platforms that are all singing and all dancing and go across community and acute healthcare settings.

That takes time. Those projects take several years. In the short term, there are things we can do. We can have summary care records. We should be able to give patients even preliminary or basic access to their own healthcare information. We have to get electronic summary care records into community care. They are still carrying around paper files. We will then roll out the maternity service, the National Integrated Medical Imaging System, NIMIS, and other services and, critically, begin to integrate those services. NIMIS carries the scans. The maternity record might carry something else and the GP records, most of which are on the system called Clanwilliam, carry something else. The question is: how do we bring all of that together and start to integrate all of that information, first and foremost for the patient, and second, for the healthcare providers?