Mr. Ciaran Breen:

I would like to respond to Deputy Ó Caoláin because there may be a misunderstanding in regard to what we are doing. We are not hiding anything from patients. Under the data protection laws, when adverse events, which the hospitals are duly obliged to notify to us, are notified to us, they are anonymised, so we simply know that an adverse event has occurred. We do not know whether there was negligence attaching to the adverse event at that time. In fact, the only time that becomes de-anonymised is when it becomes the claim and we begin to get into the issues surrounding it. We are using all of these clusters of adverse events on a learning basis for hospitals to feed back risk management solutions to them. However, it is not a question of us having information which we are not imparting to patients.