Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 28 September 2017

Public Accounts Committee

Health Information and Quality Authority: Financial Statement 2016

9:00 am

Mr. Phelim Quinn:

Not absolutely and specifically. There is certainly an agency cost accrual as a result of the slowness in the sanctioning of certain posts. For example, the slowness in the sanctioning of inspection posts would never cause agency costs to accrue because we can never bring in agencies for inspection. That would still account for a proportion but, as I said before, there were critical issues last year, some of which would have been known to the Department of Health, for example the issue with regard to the development of the national patient experience survey. There were specific process issues that needed to be dealt with, for example the development of a privacy impact assessment and the development of the Delphi study. We had to bolster our team at that point to make sure those issues were conducted appropriately.