Dr. Colm Henry:

Yes. Deputies Kelly and Cannon mentioned how unsafe healthcare can be in the absence of electronic healthcare records. One of the areas in that regard is medication safety. Traditionally, people who arrive at emergency departments would usually bring GP letters with them - unless they are directly conveyed to the hospital - and those letters would have their medication lists. We have links with GPs through Healthlink through referral to hospitals. GPs, as part of their normal communication with hospitals for scheduled care, would list someone's medication.

What the Deputy says highlights the urgency for focus, as the CEO said earlier, on not waiting for everything to be perfect but to focus on the areas of greatest impact and safety. One example of that is digitalisation of radiology procedures, which has been in place for most hospitals under the NIMIS system for many years and has resulted in safe transfer of images in real time between hospitals in a way that facilitates safe patient care. Medication safety is one area of focus that does not need everything to be perfectly lined up but it does need matters to be expedited in the way the CEO outlined earlier.