Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein)

Again, there was a lot of coverage in the papers regarding children, particularly those with scoliosis and orthopaedic issues. There was a family in touch with me who were a number of weeks in Crumlin hospital waiting on an MRI. There were other supports needed in order to take that MRI, but they were there for weeks. You would think it should not take weeks to get an MRI. I am conscious that there were other supports involved. Again, we are talking about productivity and savings, but the financial cost to the family was huge. The parents were out of work. They were sharing a room with two other children and their parents. I am just giving that as an example. People do not understand. They think that surely an MRI would be prioritised to get that child out of that bed. It did not work. I mention this case as an example. There are many examples out there in this regard.

I spoke earlier about an emergency department and how it worked for members of my family. I am conscious that there are many people listening in for whom it did not work. This puts into context what we are talking about today.

There are a couple of things that could be helpful that we have not touched on in this committee. Could the witnesses go into extra detail about the national electronic patient health records? That is an area where we would save money. I understand a pilot has been completed in conjunction with Maynooth University and is ready to be rolled out. This should provide some additional information and will hopefully eliminate the duplication of diagnostics and so on. That might be one area that we could focus on that is really positive. When will this happen?