Dr. Anne Barry-Reidy:

I add a small point on the national healthcare policy. One of the strategic strands of the policy is oral health evaluation. In the policy that was developed we looked at the existing studies that were available such as IDS-TILDA which has since been updated. There was also a level of commissioning of research. Those are all snapshots at a particular time. We will continue to use surveys such as that. In future, for all additional services that are developed and rolled out, the intention is to have an element of gathering of data from people who access services in relation to their oral health. Eventually we should have structures in place to look at that data on a national level, both to understand if the roll-out of new services is improving oral health in the way we expect it will, and also to continue to support the development of future services in having a rolling modernisation of the service.

The policy was developed by the chief dental officer in the Department. It is strongly orientated towards public health principles. One of those key principles is to have built-in evaluation and surveillance. We are gathering that data and it is informing how we monitor and develop services.