Ms Carol Grogan:

We have the Protected Disclosures (Amendment) Act but we also receive unsolicited information from people. We receive what we call "concerns" and that can be from residents, relatives or members of the public. If we see something in a media article, we log it. Separately to that, people can contact us about protected disclosures.

As Ms Fitzgerald says, there are very stringent requirements now about how we deal with those protected disclosures in terms of being able to give a person a recording of the interaction with them or give them a record of the meeting. We must offer to meet people in person. We have done that. We also look at the safeguarding of that information. Because we also receive concerns, we take the essence of that information and create a concern, which is then followed up by our inspectors. We look at all concerns that come in. We risk rate them, we advise the provider that we have received a concern, and in some cases we might ask them to provide assurances in regard to the areas that have been identified. If we believe the concern is quite a high risk, we will go out and do an inspection. That is similar to what Mr. Egan does in the public sector as well.