Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)

I agree with the Deputy. There are a couple of pieces to that. The IFMS system is essential in us tracking spending in HSE hospitals and, crucially, voluntary hospitals. Some of the deficit issues exist on the voluntary side. It is therefore even more important that they are enthusiastic about bringing this in and enabling us to track the consistency of spending, including the cost of a hip transplant in St. James's Hospital versus somewhere else. That is really important. Where we have managed to achieve some progress on that is the productivity dashboard. That shows the value of transparency in hospitals. It perhaps removes some of the myths about one hospital or another and looks at the actual productivity in different specialisms and gives us a real way of analysing that over time. Of course, it requires time to analyse that on a hospital-by-hospital or specialism basis, but at least we have the capacity to do so now. It should be the same with the financial management system.

I wish to make a clarification that I should have done earlier. Mr. Tierney has very helpfully checked and there is a way for people to get their IHI at the moment. People can email hids.info@hse.ie. They can do it that way if they wish but I still think it would be preferable to have it on the app.