Professor Matthew Sadlier:

I will say two things on this and then my colleague Ms Hetherington will speak. The first relates to logistics and practicality of it. For 15 years, I have been coming in to appear before this committee on various issues and I have been saying that the way the information for a patient in an Irish hospital is recorded and stored has largely not changed since 1890. We use paper-based notes that are stored in cardboard files. After about three years, they are required to go off to a collective storage unit because obviously they pose a fire risk. When a patient is admitted, the biggest problem is the logistics of finding old notes, getting them out of storage and actually getting them to the patient. That is outside of the legislative problems of it and Ms Hetherington will deal with the legislation. We are advocating for better record keeping. Potentially there are these things called computers, which I have heard are quite effective at this process. Maybe we should be trying to utilise them slightly better than we are at the moment.