Neasa Hourigan (Dublin Central, Green Party)
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I welcome our witnesses. I want to touch on stigma but before that I will go back to nurse prescribing. A lot of the discussion we are having today reminds me of when I followed the nurse prescribing journey in diabetes. It reminds me of that a lot, in that it is a lifestyle-based treatment and is very much about who you meet when you go into a clinic. At the front line that is often nurses who are almost the patient advocate. I know they have to go back into their everyday lives but it strikes me from seeing the process where nurse practitioners started being empowered to supply and bring people on board with pumps in the case of diabetes, that it was absolutely life changing for loads of people. One thing we saw they were struggling with was a model of care that has a legacy of being quite top down and consultant led. There seemed to be tension in implementing a cross-disciplinary team and empowering nurse practitioners to begin the journey with a person for a particular treatment. I say that on the record because I do not want the witnesses to have to say it on the record. That is a long-term difficulty but I also think that with any of those treatments based in how you live your life every day, it is incredibly important that nursing is empowered in those.

I return to stigma. In preparing for today's session, I read some of the research and came across American research on the idea that within medical professions, there is a higher level of stigmatising attitudes among health professionals than there would be in the general population. What would be the witnesses' attitude to that finding? There seem to be multiple papers. There is not just one paper, there are approximately seven of them looking at primary care physicians and the rates of stigma. It seems they are associating it with, let us say, chaotic behaviour and behaviour that is more difficult for them in a clinical setting. Is there any reason to believe that Irish care providers are different from their American counterparts?