Mr. Jim Breslin:

No. In fairness to the State Claims Agency, it could have taken a very narrow view of its role, which involves the legal management of claims. It introduced the national incident management system to ensure it is upstream when something goes wrong in order to learn from it immediately rather than having to wait for the claim to be lodged. The HSE has a lot of work to do on risk management and patient safety. The claims that are lodged are one element of that. They are a bigger piece of the jigsaw that needs to be done. I would like to mention a statistic that will probably cause the Chairman to take an intake of breath. According to the OECD, 15% of hospital expenditure internationally goes on correcting preventable errors or infections people catch in hospitals.