Mr. Bernard Gloster:

The first thing is that I suspect there will be some challenge on the staff side. To be fair to our staff, that is not because people are resistant to wanting to do good, but sometimes we still trade in perfection being the enemy of the good. People will want the IT system, the single referral system and everything else in place before we do anything. I think we should do it the opposite way around. We are currently doing it with bits of paper and IT, so there is no reason we cannot press ahead. There will be a little bit of pushback there, in my view, and there will be a view in individual parts of the service that if they participate in that, it may bring more pressure onto their waiting lists without them having the resources to respond to it. They are natural responses but I am not indifferent to how challenging that might be.

The second challenge will be finalising the pathway for parents, teachers, doctors and others to ensure everybody knows how to make that referral on the system and where the points in each county are to do that.

There is a significant communication exercise as well.

The one thing I am anxious not to do with it is to do a pilot because we tend to spend an awful long time looking at pilots. We do not get beyond that to consistency. I would rather try for consistency with the old 80:20 rule. If I got 80% of it working, I would probably be happy that it is doable. There are some challenges but I am pretty determined. When I met parents I promised them I would try to do something now as opposed to just next. In fairness to the Cabinet committee, there is a lot being done on the "next". I have a responsibility to do something now. There are children today who will not be children in a few years' time. I have a couple of months left in my public service career so I am pretty committed to getting this one piece in.

When I started working in the health service there was a single point of referral. That was in Ballynanty Health Centre over 30 years ago.