Dr. Philip Crowley:

I thank the Deputy for the question on why it has taken so long. It is a reasonable question. The policy that was produced in 2013 was based on the pilot in the two hospitals, Cork University Hospital and the Mater. The idea was that when bringing something new in, there would be some resistance to it. Potentially, people would have to change their practices. We want people to openly disclose. We have evidence that it was not happening. The pilots were to prove to people that we could do it, that there was no threat in it and that it was something which people involved welcomed once they had done it.

We based the policy on that experience. We then disseminated the policy and guidelines widely, once they were written, in 2013. So they were then available. However, because this is such an important policy, we committed, with the State Claims Agency - because we did this work together - to undertake a training programme as extensive as we had the resources to do. The reason it took so long was because of the initial format of the training. The training is very high quality and has been assessed by external evaluators and by the participants. It is very much welcomed and people find it effective. The people involved - the one or two individuals doing the training - were training everybody. So, taking into account the basis of the Deputy's question, we moved from training everybody to training trainers who would, in turn, train other people so that we could at least multiply it. Our next stage now is to develop an e-learning module so that everybody can train on it.