Dr. Colm Henry:

It is certainly a fundamental right for anybody who uses our services to voice his or her opinion, concerns, feedback and of course, complaints. We have recently completed our national patient experience survey in our acute hospital system for the second year running. It has been our absolute hope to listen to that carefully and to respond to it.

On the Ombudsman's report, we have done much work on this which needs highlighting.

The report, Learning to Get Better, is a valuable platform on which to build the review of our current complaints process, Your Service, Your Say, which we carried out in 2017. The report will also help in developing an advocacy framework with the Department of Health, which we are doing at present, and in showing that we learn. We have developed a complaints management system online with the State Claims Agency. The Ombudsman criticised the roll-out of that and we must take that on board. Working with the Ombudsman, we developed an e-learning framework to help those who are managing complaints in our community healthcare organisations and hospital groups to manage them more effectively, supporting patients as service users and our staff who are supposed to be listening and responding to complaints. We are working with the Ombudsman and we intend to fully implement the recommendations of his report in 2019 and make our system more responsive to those who use our services wherever they may present.