Professor Anne Matthews:

The Deputy's points are well made. I refer to the focus on the spatial. Logic was talked about earlier. It is not ideological; it is logical. One of the points Deputy Conway-Walsh made at the end - we did not have the time for it - was on the lack of an electronic patient record. This is back to the hospital setting in the Republic. Communication between parts of the service in the Republic cannot work. I refer to the HSE primary care. Some pieces of that are improving, especially in maternity care, but it is really slow.

That goes back to the comments about the research that is being done. Research often highlights problems with the infrastructure like data and management data sharing. That needs investment; it does not really need more research. We cannot keep finding the same thing with the research without trying to fix some of the infrastructure problems like data, management data sharing and definitely electronic data.