Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Yes, it is. As Deputy Durkan and I discussed earlier, my belief is that we need to take a much more strategic approach to medical negligence claims for two reasons. First and foremost is patient safety because this is one of the ways where we can identify where things are going wrong, and where things are going badly wrong. We should take, to my mind, a root cause analysis approach right across the system to identifying where patient safety incidents happen, and minimising and, ideally, bringing those numbers down to zero. First, and foremost, this is about the patients.

Second, a knock-on impact of that would be lower claims going out. As well as that, I do not believe at this point in time that we have sufficient mechanisms available. Far too often it relies on legal actions or High Court actions where sometimes they get settled ahead of time and sometimes there are judgments made. I believe that we need non-judicial mechanisms available as well to people.