Ms Eilísh Hardiman:

I have been in front of the committee and have apologised for the failures. We have accepted the report in relation to HIQA. We have a particular specialty that has been a particular focus in this but we have 38 other specialties that are working, many according to international practice and even meeting international benchmarks for their clinical outcomes. Definitely, I believe some of the issues were pre-CHI – they are legacy issues – and some of the issues are definitely associated with the massive change we are trying to implement.

We accepted those issues and were in a process of trying to improve them. Many of the issues, except for the springs, were raised by our staff within CHI. Everything else came through CHI. The majority of our staff are committed and health-centred. They care about what they do every day. We did not have that culture. Particularly in 2023, we went out to the staff and asked them to raise their issues and bring them to us so we could address them. The internal report has not been published. Ms Nugent looked at it, and this is not me saying this. The issues that were brought up were addressed. They were put through processes. They had not been addressed previously. The staff in that particular service are now in a much better place. To give assurances to families, that means a much safer present and not just because of the internal report but also because of the management systems that applied at the time, particularly in respect of the risk assessment, which did not wait for the report to come out. It had come up through us and had been addressed. It was being addressed with the support of the HSE. We are unusual in that we are merging and there are different cultures and differences. Those are the things on which we need to work with staff and they need to work with us in a trusting way to fix them.