Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

Then we got the document from the HSE, which told us the current position and how this flowed out of a study that was done on patient care and safety. That document told us that 20,000 of the HSE's staff were trained in this. The Health Service Executive has about 130,000 staff, and it is not that every one of them would need to be trained in this. Is that the extent of the training? There are things like that that jumped out, the fact that some of these things were established as pilots. We need to understand how the process was then rolled out, and we need to understand the interaction with the State Claims Agency, which appears to be taking a different approach, judging by the apologies that are made outside the courts on a routine basis. I still think, regarding the interaction between these two bodies, if they are not acting in symmetry in respect of the open disclosure approach, we do not have an open disclosure approach but an adversarial approach. We need to square that circle or see where that conflict is happening because it is very obvious that it is playing out in public.

The other point we were talking about is how we reduce the legal costs in respect of settlements and stop putting people through the torment of court. We absolutely need a State Claims Agency, and there will be claims that are put in that need to be challenged, but I think there is a conflict there and that is the substance of the piece of work we should do. I think the other aspects will fall within that.