John Gilroy (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I am a psychiatric staff nurse myself and have worked in the service for 30 years. I noticed that when advocacy was brought in, in parallel with the new Mental Health Act, the culture changed overnight at all staff levels. It was remarkable how the culture changed overnight when there was outside scrutiny.

Mrs. Róisín Molloy alleges that case notes were changed.

I do not want Ms Molloy to comment and I am choosing my words very carefully. It rings very true to me because when I was working in the system there was never a top-down order to secure the case notes where there was an adverse event, it was rather a convention among colleagues. The first thing the nursing staff would do was secure the case notes. We used to lock them in a drug trolley. Is it not incredible? I just wanted to record that without further comment.

There seems to be a complete lack of leadership at every level across the HSE. When we think and talk about the HSE, it is normally about our faceless officials. I am not just talking about them, but about our nurses, doctors and staff at every level. There seems to be a blame game culture within the entire service. I remember at a debriefing one time a senior clinician came to me and said "If you had done this, this would not have happened" while pointing at me. Yet, this was a no-blame debriefing. These are the sorts of issues. Do the witnesses think that mandatory reporting of infant deaths is vital? The Minister was here last week and he reminded us that four different agencies are responsible for the collection of data in this area.

Mr. Molloy set out 33 items of correspondence with the HSE, which translates into many hours of meetings and extensive consideration of information and reading. How did Mr. Molloy feel when the report was published and there were early media suggestions that the HSE was threatening to bring HIQA to court over it? Did Mr. Molloy get a sinking feeling and did it surprise him?