Mr. Stephen Mulvany:

I will deal with the questions in a straightforward manner. Policy and legislation, particularly the legislation that we are talking about, is a matter for the Minister, the Government and the Oireachtas. They are advised primarily on those matters by the Chief Medical Officer. That is not the HSE's role. To be clear, the HSE is fully supportive of full and frank open disclosure where patient safety incidents occur, that is, where unanticipated of unintended outcomes of healthcare provided has arisen so there is no query. Equally, in terms of cervical screening, we have spent a lot of time and are rolling out a patient-requested review so that women can review their slides with the support of a screening service. Again, that is something that the HSE fully supports. There are concerns in the clinical community around what may be labelled as an incident and a notified incident. In fairness to the Minister, a meeting has been scheduled where our chief clinical officer who will represent those concerns, and a couple of our board members, will meet the Minister in the next couple of weeks in order that we can relay those concerns. That is probably as much as I can say for now.