Pauline Tully (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I have a number of questions and will start with HIQA. Will the witnesses from HIQA define the authority's power specifically? It can carry out unannounced visits. I presume it has organised visits as well to different services. Does HIQA cover all services, public and private? Does it only act on reports? When it receives reports and investigates them, does it document all reports? Some of these reports are quite serious while others could be addressed within the service itself, something I presume HIQA would speak to the management about. What if the matter is more serious, for example, financial abuse? One case involved staff claiming expenses from the residents' accounts for meals, takeaways and so on. Was that rectified? Were the residents reimbursed? Was it reported to An Garda Síochána? If the report relates to physical or sexual abuse, is it reported to An Garda Síochána or social protection teams?

Professor Phelan from Sage Advocacy mentioned that work on awareness of abuse is needed, meaning what abuse is. I presume people might not know how to report it so what does Professor Phelan propose we do about that? What is the best way to get that message out about what abuse there is?

Professor Kelly spoke about mental health. Obviously, the percentage we spend on mental health needs to increase. He said it is very difficult to recruit consultant posts within inpatient psychiatry. Will he explain why this is the case? He also spoke about health and addiction services. I thought the issue of dual diagnosis was being addressed because, usually, if there is an addiction problem, mental illness will be found and vice versa, where there is mental illness, addiction is often found, so the two need to be addressed together. Professor Kelly also spoke about the lack of joined-up thinking between the different aspects of the health service and individual health identifier numbers. Would personal public service, PPS, numbers not be sufficient to ensure there is joined-up thinking? In this world of IT, that should not be an issue.

If the safeguarding protection teams receive a complaint, for example, from a member of staff in a service, can they act on this? I have been told they cannot. Is this true or is there something they can do? All the speakers mentioned strengthening legislation around safeguarding. What difference would this make to the services they provide and the work they do?