Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)

There are a couple of different things there. On digitalisation, I appreciate the Deputy has heard about it before. To be fair, we would not have been able to download the HSE health app unless a substantial body of work had gone into that. Approximately 75,000 people have downloaded it, and it is the first step in this. This comes down to the investment decisions in the NDP and being able to take this forward. I do have the budget in the Department of Health at the moment to do that, but you can clearly see that the priority in the programme for Government is health digitalisation. My view is that it should be digitalisation and other infrastructure, but we will have that argument on a different day. I see a clear pathway to funding a different digital system. Derek Tierney is with me and is doing the work to drive that. There is a clear plan for this spend and I see a clear pathway over a number of years for the different stages of that and the delivery of that. It is absolutely essential for what we are doing, and the inefficiencies highlighted by the Deputy are particularly frustrating and must be frustrating for people working in the system. We have quite a body of work to do on that.

For the information of the Deputy and as an update on the progress on the national electronic health record, the business case is being developed and is currently subjected to the external assurance process before it goes to the Government. A prior information notice, which is a key part of the procurement process, was published in June 2025 and informed different EHR suppliers about the health service's interest in a national enterprise-level EHR system. A national electronic prescribing service tender was published in June 2025 to develop secure and efficient transmission and storage for electronic prescriptions and dispensations for patients. Those are crucial updates in regard to it.

With regard to electronic health, I would also bring in the virtual wards at St. Vincent's and Limerick. I would like to see more rolled out because this is very effective. There can be two nursing staff working overnight for 30 patients, which really could not be replicated in a hospital setting. The outcomes are very good. I would invite members to come to St. Vincent's or Limerick to see it in operation. However, if we give funding for the capacity to have 25 or 30 patients, I expect the hospital to bend over backwards to find those patients out of 550 beds and to make sure it is being utilised properly. For example, I was very disappointed to see what I regarded as the underutilisation of a virtual ward over a bank holiday weekend, which impacted on beds.

Regarding staff retention, one of the most important pieces is how we treat and enable our workforce. One of the key things I hear repeatedly, including from Rachel Kenna, who is in charge of workforce planning across the board, is that we are trying to give everybody the opportunity to work at the top of their licence. In particular, it is fair to say that we see the best outcomes with advanced practitioners, whether it is in nursing or social care. It is about what we can do to further empower them in leading diagnostics and triaging in different clinical settings.