Dr. Jenny Mack:

I can add to that. It was an important question. I thank Mr. Hughes for asking it. To provide a bit of context on data in Northern Ireland and Ireland, we have very different systems and the providers are quite disparate. There are many providers. We do things quite differently. In general, we are collecting data to measure the impact of our public health strategies, Making Life Better in Northern Ireland and Healthy Ireland in Ireland. There is learning to be had from each jurisdiction. It would be helpful to collect data that looked at population health as we understand it, which we have discussed, as well as the wider determinants of health because both population health frameworks talk about the importance of environmental conditions that we live in, economic structures around us, the quality of housing we live in and the safety of our communities. These other factors are highly relevant to health and we need to have them in the same picture.

Operationally, we need to have the additional funding and resourcing in order to staff it. At the minute, you have to be from a medical background in other to train in public health and be a public health consultant in Ireland, whereas in Northern Ireland that has been opened up with the rest of the UK to include people from different disciplines. That is relevant because if we are going to have a North-South approach to data collection, we need to have the skills and expertise within the workforce. That is not to say our clinical colleagues do not have that - of course they do - but data analytics is a very specific skill and the art of being able to communicate it to different audiences is another skill entirely. Is there any point in having all of this data if we do not communicate it clearly to the communities that need it? They want to know the health of their local communities and the policymakers are trying to make big decisions. There is a whole art and science when it comes to data collection, and we need to have that multidisciplinary team around the system for it to work effectively.