Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome what is set out in this letter. Is it adequate? It certainly is not. We should not just leave it to our report. We need to look into this further to identify how to save money. I could tackle this in many ways. I could tackle it on an emotional level from my personal experience with family, which is most people's contact with the health service when something happens and they are left in that place. Alternatively, I could tackle it in the way I should as a member of the Committee of Public Accounts. What is proper governance? When reviews are set up local independent outside the country, what do they cost? What do they learn from them? What can we avoid in the future? That is the purpose. Like the Chairman, I am in no way reassured that that is happening here.

I will give a specific personal example without going into any details whatsoever of an independent review of a family member that was carried out. It was anything but independent. It was absolutely forced from the system. It was not proactive in what was an open-and-shut case involving admission. Notwithstanding all that, it placed unacceptable pressure on a family to try to get some accountability. I am only giving one tiny example. This is repeated. If we go back to Savita Halappanavar in 2012, there was no openness and accountability in that case. It was dragged from the system and eventually an independent review was set up.

As the Chairman has pointed out, something must happen about learning. That is an extraordinary statement. Those of us on the committee are endeavouring to get value for money. The health service is under pressure and I am the first to acknowledge that. I have great admiration for most of the staff. However, mistakes are being made. Some are part of life and others are because of the extraordinary stress they are under, lack of training and lack of learning.

It ties in with the State Claims Agency, which ultimately picks up on behalf of the public the claims that inevitably come which people do not want to bring at all. They want accountability and want someone to apologise. They want someone to explain how something went wrong. Most important, using my family as an example, they want assurance that this will not happen again and that the next patient will not suffer as experienced by a family member. I do not see that happening. I seek the Chair's assistance as to how we deal with this in terms of the HSE and the State Claims Agency because I am tired of this type of language.

More important, it is not bringing accountability to the system. It is not saving money and it is not giving value for money. I will finish on an issue, which I have raised previously. I tabled a parliamentary question which asked what independent reviews had taken place in the hospital in Galway over the past ten years and I received the extraordinary answer that there was no system for recording reviews or their cost. That is just about the review and the cost, without mentioning the learning from the reviews. As a Deputy in Galway West, I do not know how many independent reviews were carried out over the past ten years, what they cost or, most importantly, what was learned and what changes were made. I am referring to independent reviews but we also have the language of "local reviews". We cannot leave this. I would like to come back to it. I will take direction on how to deal with it, but it is certainly a big issue.