Patrick Costello (Dublin South Central, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I wish to offer my condolences to those who have lost loved ones and to people living in nursing homes who have lost their friends, especially in light of our normal cultural ways of mourning loss being so difficult to achieve.

It is a great privilege for me to be here to ask questions of our guests. As a social worker, I am usually the one on the receiving end of interrogation by HIQA. It is nice that, for once, the tables are turned. Mr. Quinn stated that there is no clinical governance linked to the HSE for private nursing homes. I ask him to deal with the clinical governance for private nursing homes. Are there minimum staffing levels, staff-resident ratios and so on? How are such matters decided? What clinical governance exists, apart from HIQA enforcing standards?