Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

In Britain, the starting point, which is where we are coming from, is if something goes wrong and a patient is harmed, the health care provider has to own up, provide full information on the incident, say "Sorry", provide the patient with help, if needed, and outline what future inquiries will be dealt with to make sure it does not happen again. Liability is not mentioned. My experience of human behaviour is if we were to treat people like that, inevitably the volume of litigation would reduce. Perhaps this is a philosophical disagreement and we will have time to tease it our further. In fairness, I should have said that the Minister for Health contacted us this morning about some of the open disclosure issues to say that they had been examined by the Joint Committee on Health and we could link up with him in advance of Report Stage to tease them out. We will take him up on that.