Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I have a quick follow-up question for Mr. Connaghan as acting director general of the HSE. I cited the example of a third of GUH's operating theatres being shut because it cannot hire a handful of theatre nurses. I have other examples across the system of hospitals incurring massive fixed costs, including staffing, with detrimental effects on patients and on doctors, who are getting increasingly frustrated with coming in on a Monday to find the operating theatre closed. Patients are brought in the night before, go through pre-op and are ready to go only to be told it is not available. How is it that people like us can meet hospital staff and find this out, yet the HSE cannot identify the issues and definitively deal with them?

I have one follow-up question for the Minister on Mr. Justice Kelly's findings. The Minister and I have been going back and forth in correspondence and he has pointed out that the HSE is reviewing its own recruitment and that he would examine the individual case. I had made an additional request; I apologise if the Minister has come back to me on it but I have not seen a response yet. Mr. Justice Kelly stated that there are wholly unsuitable persons working as doctors in our system, and that medical practitioners with little knowledge of the basics of medicine have been recruited to Irish hospitals. Understandably, he is saying they pose a danger to patients. I ask that the Minister, the Department or the HSE immediately conduct an audit. If we have doctors, whether there are five or 50 of them, in the healthcare system with little knowledge of the basics of medicine, we need to find out who they are. It is not about attacking them or anything like that but there is a patient protection issue here. Given such a senior judge has said this, will the Minister undertake to commission an audit? As a matter of urgency, he needs to find out not only how it is happening but also where these doctors are, if they currently pose a danger, and if we can help them, for example, through additional training. We must protect patients if necessary from people who do not understand medicine, and it might be advisable to look back at case history to see if there are clusters of malpractice or patient safety incidents attached to doctors who may have little knowledge of the basics of medicine.