Ms Jennifer Hanrahan:

Normally the ones we get are those where families are about to be made homeless for some reason or other. We have had people living in their cars who ring us, and they are looking for homeless accommodation. I am not sure about the tenant in situpurchase example. On the other reports, we do a lot of work in our office that we are obviously very proud of. Looking back at older reports, the one that comes to mind is the A Good Death report. I think the initial report was done in 2014 and a follow-up report was done in 2017 or 2018. It was about complaints about end-of-life care in hospitals. The Ombudsman had received a number of complaints about end-of-life care. He did the report and it was mainly a commentary and digest of the complaints, and a commentary on the type of complaints we were receiving. Recommendations were again accepted by the HSE. On foot of that they have an end-of-life forum, which involves the HSE and the Irish Hospice Foundation. One of our investigators sits on that forum. They have done a lot of work in recent years producing information booklets for families to know what will happen around the end of life. There is a lot of different guidance and we feed into that. We keep an active eye on that too because we like to see what is happening with our complaints about end of life, so we can feed back into the end-of-life forum.

The other report was the Learning to Get Better report from 2015, which was one of the first own-initiative investigations ever undertaken by the Department. It was initiated on foot of health complaints, but was more to do with the level of health complaints we were receiving. The then Ombudsman was not certain if the percentage we were receiving was equivalent to the number of interactions people were having with the health service. It looked into whether people could access the complaint system. It looked at the complaint system to see if that was the reason we were not getting complaints, at whether people knew how to make a complaint and at whether it was easy for them to make a complaint. A lot of people felt their care would suffer if they made a complaint and things like that. Recommendations were again made, and actually the year service was updated after that. We have worked with the HSE on that, and we go to a quarterly complaint managers forum. We follow up with them quarterly and then one of our investigators attends the quarterly complaint managers forum as well. We follow up on them to make sure the recommendations are followed up.