Mr. Paul Reid:

I will answer the Deputy's question on two fronts. First, in terms of the infrastructure, there is no doubt from the cyberattack and reports that emerge, we have 2,000 systems across the HSE, not all of which are interconnected. We have 4,000 servers across the HSE and at least 80,000 devices deployed on that network. What we must do is look at that infrastructure in a more effective manner. We must start to put some of that infrastructure into what is called "the cloud" so that we are not naturally exposed to our core infrastructure in the same manner. As an example, if you take the system deployed for the vaccination programme, it was the one process, the one system and the one service that was not impacted by the cyberattack, because that system was new, it was specified, and it was in the cloud. Part of that is putting more services, including Office 365, in the cloud.

In regard to patient records and data, we have a whole suite of e-health initiatives, some of which are major parts of Sláintecare, that will have to be invested in as part of the strategy for e-health initiatives. One opportunity we took during the vaccination programme was to get greater information on patient identifiers, single, unified health identifiers for patient records, through that process, and that has helped us hugely.