Colm Burke (Cork North Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank all of our guests here for dealing with the queries that have been raised. I want to move onto an issue that I raised in the Dáil yesterday, which is in relation to the level of claims against the HSE and where we are with that issue. The amount paid out for the level of claims in 2021 was €461 million. That was paid out by the State Claims Agency. Not all of that figure related to healthcare but, as I understand it, the bulk of it was. As the figure in the previous year was €372 million, that is an increase of €87 million.

In relation to the estimates, it is my understanding that were everything settled in the morning for all claims against the State, the figure would be approximately €4.2 billion. However, the figure for the healthcare sector is approximately €3.4 billion. We have dealt with the issue of insurance. It is in the context of dealing with the insurance Bill yesterday that I raised this issue. We made major changes to many areas of insurance over the past ten or 15 years but we have not really made any major changes as to how we process and deal with things when incidents do arise. No matter how careful people are within a hospital setting, errors do happen. What we try to do is try to reduce them as much as possible.

Has any analysis been carried out on what can be done to reduce the level of errors and hence the level of claims? Where an error arises, should we be far more proactive in dealing with it than the current system appears to be? Unfortunately, the HSE is getting caught up by post mortems, inquests and so on. I am thinking of the idea of having an overall review of how we can deal with this in future.