James Reilly (Dublin North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I wish to make a comment on this issue, because I attended that conference this morning and wish to reiterate forcefully here a point I made there. In the past, people have considered patient safety to be a matter for clinicians solely, and members will have heard people stating on radio that administrators would not understand that issue or that it would not be fair. It is a core duty and a core concern of management, and patient safety must be at the core of what each chief executive officer does. To draw an analogy, the airline industry is one of the safest in the world and no one in this room really believes that only pilots are involved in that, do they? When drawing up the national service plan, we are making it clear where patient safety should be in this plan - namely, right at the top. Moreover, we are making it plain to all new chief executive officers who take over the hospital groups, as well as to existing managers, that it is part of their core duty and core concern and that they are as responsible as anyone else.