Mr. Bernard Gloster:

On performance, the Minister is quite correct that she sets the policy direction. We used to have multitudes of reports and all sorts of things in the HSE. One could find oneself fierce confused going into any meeting. We now have a single national performance report that is produced every month. We publish it on our website. Ms Sandra Broderick, who is one of my six regional executive officers, goes through a formal process with me where she has to account for all of the performance in her region, as do my directors, be they for finance or otherwise. It is a very formal, documented, recorded process. Where performance is not improving, I make necessary interventions, depending on the context. Most performance management is not clobbering somebody over the head but enabling him or her to achieve performance. There is the odd clobber.