Mr. Derek Tierney:

That challenge is well understood. Our local pharmacies are equipped with IT infrastructure and they are now connected through healthlink. One of the greatest innovations during Covid was GPs being able to send electronic prescriptions directly to the pharmacy so there was no paper travelling. It was all done electronically. We will build on that through rolling out an e-prescription solution.

The Deputy's earlier point is well made. We have 48 hospitals across the State. They are all on the same network but they are not all on the same system. Our challenge over the next two years, and we have already commenced procurement, is to build what we call a shared-care record that will sit at the heart of all our hospital systems. If you are a clinician in Mayo and treating a patient from Dublin, the shared-care record will at least allow you to see hospital-level information that follows with the patient. That is the first step in the journey. There are ambitions to go beyond that to a full national electronic health records system like the Scandinavian countries or Denmark but that takes significant time and investment and capacity.