Dr. Brendan O'Shea:

Tele-medicine is the use of any technology, it could be a telephone or FaceTime, to develop a contact or enable contact between a therapist - it does not have to be a GP - and the client. That is tele-medicine. The person does not have to come to the centre. Social prescribing is very clever. It seems very obvious. Every community has its own resources but they are all different. It might be a club, societies, a HSE service, a sports club or another resource. The idea behind social prescribing is that the practice develops a detailed expertise about this because these things change. If my colleague or I feel that this is a person whose life has entered into a period of fallow after a loss and they are adrift, we talk to them. Dr. Ó Ciardha would refer to their social prescribing manager. That person would sit down with the individual, find out where they are coming from, what their interests are and would map them very precisely. In Dr. Ó Ciardha's practice they have in the order of 50 different agencies around the Tallaght area with links and they send individuals or they identify the services. It is bespoke social engineering, so to speak.