Jack Chambers (Dublin West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the amendment. For patient safety, there should not be an option about making a disclosure about negligence or something that has occurred to a person within the health service. To make that optional is hypocritical in the extreme. The whole approach to medical ethics is to ensure there is openness, and this would put that in a forthright way in the statute, which is important. To make an optional aspect to this, which is what the legislation does by saying a health service provider may make an open disclosure on patient safety incidents, is contradictory in itself. There should be more of a positive obligation on the health service provider and on the clinical team to disclose openly and properly whatever the incident was or is. We should do that.