Professor Harry Kennedy:

There is a terrific book on this which I referenced in my submission. There are three kinds of expertise. There are experts by experience - my colleague here is an example - who have an intuitive understanding of the lived experience of a topic, which is a very important aspect. There are interactive experts, people who talk to contributory experts all the time and come to understand the vocabulary and can be quite fluent in that vocabulary. Examples of this type are journalists, lawyers and pure managers. Contributory experts are a bit like master craftsmen. They are not only at the top of their skill and ability through training and long expertise but they can expand their subject a bit. Senior mental health professionals in all the disciplines are the contributory experts who know how to do something and how to make it better. Managers talk to them every day and absorb from them but will lose their expertise the minute they stop talking to contributory experts. The HSE, like many health services, is run by these interactive experts. It is not run by the contributory experts. That is a problem.