Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)

I ask Deputies to support the amendments in this grouping to ensure all health service providers as defined under the Bill are empowered to collect and record patients' PPSNs. Our health system needs a robust and proven identifier so that health information can effectively and reliably be associated with the correct individual. That is essential for care and treatment and patient safety. As part of this, the Bill aims to enhance patient safety through stronger identified patient processes including best practice use of the PPSN and eircode to uniquely identify patients. In that context, the individual health identifier, IHI, was provided for in the Health Identifiers Act 2014 as a unique identifier for health services. The IHI was designed and developed to enable the unique identification of a patient across healthcare services. Since the enactment of that legislation, the HSE has been embedding the IHI in health information programmes and locations across health services. However, in order to enable the full benefits that IHIs can bring in terms of quality, safety and efficiency, the IHI match rate needs to be as close to 100% as possible. Evaluation of those match rates shows that those health systems that are already collecting and recording the PPSN have significantly higher match rates than those systems that do not. It is also important to recognise that the health systems are part of the wider public service ecosystem, including the national digital strategy. For example, the national data infrastructure, which has been developed as part of the Civil Service renewal plan and the public service ICT strategy, includes the PPSN. It is one of the three trusted unique identifiers, along with eircodes and unique business identifiers, to facilitate the sharing and aggregation of data on a public service-wide basis to support digital services.

Amendment No. 11 amends the reference to the PPSN under the patient summary.

Amendment No. 13 provides for the insertion of a new section mandating a health service provider to record the PPSN of his or her patients and associate the PPSN with any record of the health service provider they make in the provision of health service to that patient. It also empowers a health service provider to request a patient provide his or her PPSN, empowers the HSE to use a PPSN to identify a patient in order to identify and link the patient's health information to his or her electronic health record, and mandates a relevant person to provide the PPSN of a patient where the number is requested by the HSE and they have that PPSN in their possession.

The patient cannot be refused a health service solely because they have not been allocated or issued with a PPSN or because they are not in a position to provide it. That is really important.