Ms Mary Dunnion:

It was in August 2014. We were disappointed to learn in one of our final meetings with Portlaoise in October 2014 that it had not received that tool and, as a consequence, would not have been able to reap the benefits of the findings of the tool. Significantly, the tool had indicated that there was not a strong culture of assessing safety and quality of services in the organisation. For example, there was no evidence that the senior management team collectively walked around the hospital to engage with patients and staff. The HSE has set a standard that complaints from patients should be replied to and resolved within a 30 day period but only 16% of complaints to Portlaoise hospital met that standard. That was a worrying finding because we were meeting patients who had not received any response to their complaints. It was even more worrying to find these issues were not discussed at management level, which meant arrangements were not in place to spot the problems arising.