Seán Fleming (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)
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We will have to make a recommendation in this regard, Chairman, because the situation is unacceptable in 2014. Public service cards, complete with photographic ID, are being issued to people for use in their dealings with social welfare offices and Revenue. We are being told today that the HSE is not part of that system and, for some reason, patients cannot use the public service cards that have been issued across the board. When the property tax was introduced last year, it was possible to match every home in the country with the relevant PPS numbers. As I said already, there has been no difficulty with Irish Water accessing PPS numbers. Yet patients cannot be identified in this way. It is a bizarre situation.

Will the delegates speak to Revenue or the Department of Social Protection and ask one of them to design a system for the HSE? The HSE should not be spending its money on this; it is a public service issue. I have a list a mile long of organisations that can share PPS numbers across the public service, including Revenue, local authority housing departments and social welfare offices. That system should be extended to include the HSE. I am amazed that the delegates are apparently determined to reinvent the wheel. The submission tells us there were 838,922 day case discharges in 2013. On that basis, I would estimate that 1.2 million or 1.3 million people go through the hospital system every year, including inpatients, outpatients and day patients. All of those people have PPS numbers, but the delegates want to spend time and money developing a whole new system. The HSE's resources are simply too valuable to be spent in this way. We look to it to care for the health of the nation. This type of administrative function should be outsourced to some other public body that has already done it several times.