Professor Ursula Kilkelly:

I can start off here before handing back to the director to comment on some of the more operational issues. In March of this year the Minister set up the review implementation group, which I chair and which includes representation from the Oberstown management, staff and board; from the trade union; from the Department; and also an external specialist on child development. We have met nine times to date. The task of this group is really to bring together the recommendations of all of the reviews that have been undertaken on the campus over the past year. We are doing this with a view to carrying out out a number of things - to record and track the implementation of all of those recommendations, which is very significant; but prior to that to also analyse, synthesise and make sense of what all of this is telling us. We have created a framework of five headings and 14 themes, and this framework was included in the summary of the review document that we published in August. We are currently continuing that work and we are on track to complete it by the end of the year when a report will be made to the Minister. This work will achieve two things. First, it will allow us in the future to look back and identify what happened to the recommendations of all of those reports; and second, and as part of that, it will allow us to see what progress was made and what was the record of implementation. It has, then, a double purpose. This is a very important collaborative process that draws in many different perspectives from the people around the table. It also fits in with the ongoing work of the board, including our planning and our constant examination of the extent to which all of these issues converge around the HIQA recommendations. We do not see all of these as separate, disjointed processes but rather we are looking to bring all of this together into a single body of work. By the end of our work we will produce a full action plan around the recommendations and this will of course be publicly available. All of the recommendations have already been published in one form or other and we communicated those at our external engagement group and our stakeholder engagement session in May of this year. Subsequently, of course, further analysis has been undertaken and all of that will be published by the end of the year.

I will let the director deal with the more operational matters but I am happy to come back in then to fill in any gaps or address any issues further.