Greatest National Impact Project 2022 Public Vote

Top Five Finalists:
Public Voting is completed.

The following five projects have been nominated by the public and deemed by the specialist judging panel as the top finalists. Voting completed on 21st November 2022.

The projects below are listed in alphabetical order only. Click on the relevant title bar to view summary information on the project. Don't forget to watch the supporting videos.

*Please note that voting is only available for residents of Ireland due to the nature of the award. Your access may be limited if you are outside of the country or using corporate/personal VPNs.

1. Construction of the new Fab34 Plant at Intel, Leixlip, Co. Kildare

Ireland is part of Intel’s global manufacturing site expansion plans. Construction activity began in early 2019 on the multiyear project that will double the available manufacturing space in Ireland. Intel is investing €17 billion in this new fab development – Fab 34 - which will enable the production of Intel 4, the company’s most advanced process technology. Construction activity is well advanced and tool installation began at the beginning of 2022. The project creates 1,600 full time, hi-tech roles once complete and involves 6,000 construction workers at its peak. The construction project is the largest that has ever been undertaken in Ireland and is the first time for Intel to build 2 fab modules at the same time. The new facility will contain approx. 500,000 sq foot of cleanroom space.

Intel Video to Support Public Voting

2. HSE Covid Vaccination Programme

The National Covid19 Vaccination Programme is the largest public vaccination programme rolled out in the history of the Irish state.

The worldwide Covid19 pandemic posed the greatest health threat to people and society in the last century. To date across the globe 6.6 million people have lost their lives to Covid19 including 8,000 people in Ireland.

The development and roll out of vaccines to protect the world from the threat of Covid marked the start of a turning point in our battle against the virus across the world.

In Ireland it marked the start of a national vaccination programme unseen of in magnitude before to protect initially the most vulnerable to the disease when vaccines were in scarce supply and later extended to the wider population over the following two years.

Delivering a programme of work of this scale required the entire health service including our hospitals, our community services, GPs and pharmacists and our public health services supported by our Government, our Department of Health and our National Advisory Immunisation Committee to work together to rapidly establish a national project to roll out vaccines as quickly as possible.

Initially vaccines were prioritised for the most vulnerable and for healthcare workers. The programme for administration commenced within the Acute Hospitals and Residential Care Settings. Mass vaccination centres were established across the country to deliver vaccines to the wider population, supported by GPs and community pharmacies.

There were many critical success factors to the Vaccination Programme. The overall approach to engagement, building a comprehensive and trusting customer service model and the development of a Contractor Relationship Manager Team to support the public and frontline staff through emerging challenges, was important.

To date 97% of the population of people over 18 have completed their primary vaccination. The programme has delivered 8 million primary vaccines and 4 million booster vaccines since December 2020. Ireland has the second highest uptake in the EU for primary vaccination, and are in the top 5 countries or higher for uptake of booster 1 and booster 2.

Delivering the National Covid19 Vaccination Programme required the rapid development of a programme management infrastructure to include:

· Governance structure including clinical governance

• Workforce planning- Employment, education, training

• Building ICT

• Finance

• Communications

• Operations

• Vaccine Management

• Vaccination facilities

The impact of the vaccine roll-out cannot be underestimated and has ensured:

- the immunisation of the population against Covid 19,

- protected individuals and society

-enabled the health system to function appropriately, and

-allowed the Irish economy to reopen and return to normal

This was the first time a vaccination programme of this size was rolled out in Ireland, and it required the development and implementation of new ICT systems and processes to manage end to end user information and access. The benefits of the ICT systems in place ensured all vaccination information was captured and collated, using data to inform decisions relating to population health during the pandemic. The development of a digital dashboard which pulled information from all vaccine centres into a centralised filing system was important to ensure equity of access and ensure interventions could be put in place to support low vaccine uptake.

This informed strategic public health decisions based on demographics, epidemiology trends and up-to-date data and future projections. It was core to safety of society during the pandemic.

The learning from the development and implementation for the national roll out of Covid-19 vaccinations has great potential to support childhood vaccination programmes and other public health priorities inclusive of the future redesign and integration of our health services.

HSE Video to Support Public Voting

3. HSE eHealth Digital Response to the Covid Pandemic

This programme of work delivered by the HSE eHealth team encompassed the delivery of multiple technical solutions to support the protection of our population from the Covid Pandemic. The range of technical solutions included portals, applications, telehealth services and health intelligence data all of which contributed to the protection of citizens and health care workers, while enabling public health services to track the disease and respond to demands for Covid testing, contact tracing and vaccinations.

It started with the rapid delivery of an integrated Covid Testing and Contact Tracing system to allow doctors refer their patients for Covid Test Appointments with access to electronic Covid test results within 12 hours. These results could be communicated back to the Citizen and their clinicians. In the case of positive Covid test results, public health services were able to identify cases and use contact tracing to inform citizens and their close contacts of the need to isolate in order to protect their families and the wider population.

Within 3 weeks of confirming that the Covid Vaccines would be available, portals were deployed to allow Citizens and Health Workers register themselves for and schedule their vaccination appointments. The individual health identifier (IHI) was used to create a Covid Vaccination record for all those who received a vaccine. These systems were later used to provide Digital Covid Vaccination Certificates, allowing Citizens to dine in restaurants as restrictions eased and international travel resumed.

While the general public would have had sight and interaction directly with these eHealth systems, the same systems were also required to support the vulnerable among us for Covid testing and vaccine administration to the house bound and those in residential care facilities such as nursing homes and for their health care workers.

Technical solutions were also put in place to protect the public, patients and health workers by the provision of telehealth consultation facilities and ePrescribing, minimising the requirement for patients to visit health care facilities with additional solutions deployed to help protect health workers and the general public such as telehealth solutions, accommodation for health workers who needed to isolate, electronic prescribing and the Covid Tracking App.

The data and information insights captured by these systems allowed public health services to track the trajectory of the disease and outbreaks. It also enabled the HSE to identify where the demands for testing and vaccinations were greatest, indicating where to locate Covid Test and Vaccination centres in close proximity to large volumes of demand for Covid services.

There were multiple types of technical systems, applications and devices that needed to be rapidly deployed and integrated on the HSE’s network infrastructure to provide registration portals, identification services, tracking systems for Covid Testing, Contact Tracing and Vaccinations, appointment scheduling, SMS text message communications, secure electronic messaging and data analytics.

Underpinning all these systems was the necessity to ensure that all personal data was secure and that the systems were operational 24 hours a day with the capability to perform and cope with large volumes and surges of requests and to turn around responses in some cases within minutes for e.g. SMS communications with members of the public.

It is testimony to the quality of the systems that were delivered that these systems, while rapidly deployed, have remained secure and available on a 24 hours basis, 7 days a week since the onset of Covid and were not impacted by the Cyber event in May 2021.

The operational response to Covid was so time critical that it quite simply could not have been achieved without the digital systems that were put in place and the capture of accurate and timely data and information required for the government and the HSE to make the decisions needed to protect the public and health services.

There was not a member of the nation’s population that did not benefit from the availability of these systems and the data captured be they a citizen, patient, carer, clinician or health worker.