Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)

The witnesses are all very welcome. It is very significant that they are here today because part of the Good Friday Agreement committee's work has been to break this down sector by sector and answer questions about what an all-island service would look like in different areas. We have already done economics and finance, and women and the constitution. I do not mean that they are static papers, and we have cross-party agreement on them, but rather that we add to them all of the time. This is our first session in our module on what an all-island health service would look like, so we wanted to have the IPH's input into this. I have certainly learned a lot today about the great work the IPH does.

I am mindful that it has been 27 years since the Good Friday Agreement and that was when the IPH was set up. My questions will be framed around what we do from here. What do we do with the next phase or how would the witnesses answer the question about what a public health system would look like on an all-island basis? I particularly want to home in on the report that was based on a discussion paper examining the potential for a multidisciplinary public health workforce in Ireland because that is one of the challenges we have. I see from the discussion paper that we will need "a strategic roadmap, inter-disciplinary competency frameworks for skills development, a registration system for public health professionals, [as well as] a regulatory body, accreditation, and professional development."

That, in itself is a huge piece of work. Will the witnesses speak to that and to how we will do this better? We are trying to do this across a whole load of areas in terms of sharing labour across the island because it is one of the biggest constraints we have in health and in other areas as well.