‘I never told Paschal he was insane’: Inside Stephen Donnelly’s data-obsessed drive to fix the health service

HSE boss Bernard Gloster warned Stephen Donnelly of "significant and punitive risks to the public" by cutting health spending next year

Hugh O'Connell

A red tray with a label that reads ‘Minister’s Data’ sits on the edge of Stephen Donnelly’s desk in his Department of Health office. That tells you a lot about how the Health Minister operates; how he thinks data — numbers, statistics, graphs and charts — are key to fixing the Irish health service.

At the core of this is what he calls a “savings and productivity taskforce”, the details of which were first revealed in last weekend’s Sunday Independent, and which will be, in Donnelly’s mind, “a game changer”. In the new year he will start publishing data from the Health Performance Visualisation Platform (HPVP) that will reveal the best and worst performing hospitals in the country.