Vol. 574 No. 3
196 Cecilia Keaveney asked the Minister for Health and Children the timescale she envisages for the inter-agency messaging service and for her Department to roll out the electronic birth registration data for child benefit claim purposes in County Donegal; and if she will make a statement on whether the cross-Border element will be encompassed, if, for example, Donegal mothers have their baby in a Derry hospital. [26992/03]
A new civil registration IT support system provides for the electronic registration of births and deaths that occur within the State. It also issues birth, death and marriage certificates from the central database and is currently being rolled out to civil registration offices. The system has already been introduced in a number of offices. Arrangements are being finalised with the remaining offices, including offices within the administrative remit of the North-Western Health Board. Electronic search and issue of certificates was introduced in the Sligo office as part of this process. These aspects of the system will soon be implemented in the remaining NWHB civil registration offices and will be followed shortly thereafter by electronic registration.
Births that occur in Northern Ireland will fall to be registered in the relevant offices within that jurisdiction.
The REACH agency development is an inter-agency messaging service and it is a key building block of the public service broker. It is a centralised messaging hub that facilitates co-operation and the exchange of information between public sector agencies using agreed date and communication standards. Since September the IAMS has facilitated the transfer of life event information between the General Register Office and the Department of Social and Family Affairs for the purposes of allocating personal public service numbers to newborn children. They are then registered on the new electronic birth registration system that is currently being rolled out by the GRO. In October the IAMS also started to transmit life event data between the GRO and the Central Statistics Office.
At present work is ongoing on a new service, the death event publication service. Its aim will be to provide information on registered deaths to pension paying Departments and other interested public service agencies.
