Mr. Ciar?n Devane:

Audit and risk is recognisable for many organisations. Compliance is obviously a major function on the audit side, and then trying to anticipate where the corporate risks are. For example, to its credit, that sub-committee anticipated what we would do and how we would respond if we had a cyberattack.

Related to that is safety and quality, which is both about clinical risk, or when things go wrong, but also around asking what we are doing to improve the quality of outcome. Are we monitoring the clinical strategies and making sure they are being implemented and we are seeing the outcomes they are supposed to deliver?

The people and culture sub-committee looks at things such as recruitment. Increasingly, however, as a board and a committee, we are asking how we create an environment and culture where it is more uniformly a pleasure to turn up at work.

We are also asking what can be done to bring about an improvement and what skills and tools can be made available to the workforce. The major issue, the intractable one, is strategic workforce planning, which we are getting into in a big way. With regard to plans – maybe disability would be an example – things like the roadmap are excellent but it is a matter of how we generate a workforce to deliver on them.

The area of performance and planning relates to the NSP, the corporate plan and monitoring against those. It involves the heavy operational work.

The final area is technology and transformation. We set up the related sub-committee because we were worried about the circumstances if we had one committee examining this year, effectively, and how we were performing regarding the national service plan, and we were worrying about risk. I am referring to where we were doing some of the heavy lifting, in addition to the board itself, in respect of what would really shift the dial, such as eHealth and ensuring that as we address the day-to-day problems, the things we really need to do to build the community-based services are not forgotten. Those are all the areas.