Tom Neville (Limerick County, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Since the PPARS debacle some years ago, there seems to have been a shying away from any attempt to upgrade IT systems within the health service. Delay is no longer acceptable, however, and the challenge must be met head on. We live in an IT age, with cloud computing and so on. Ten or 12 years after PPARS, however, we still have a paper-based system. Any large organisation in the private sector has an enterprise resource planning, ERP, system, usually running on a SAP or Oracle platform, with data accessible from user iPads and integrated such that a person in one office can access information from another office. Introducing something similar in our hospitals would free up a lot of resources, which is vital given that the crisis we are facing is largely to do with the management of resources. Are there plans to put an integrated IT system in place across the health service? We need to examine the logistical models.

In regard to waiting list times, will short-term targets, of three, six, nine and 12 months, be set? Will the Minister also give an update on the emergency department and the 93-bed unit at University Hospital Limerick?

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