Ms Phil N? Sheaghdha:

From our meetings with HSA officials, they are telling us that they require additional funding to have a separate division to deal with the health service. They will also give statistics and their annual report sets out that their inspections of the health service increased over the past two years. That is true but the majority of those inspections related to Covid outbreaks and, therefore, the number of inspections into assaults reduced, and only totalled 69 in the calendar year of 2022, which is lower than the previous year. Considering the number of assaults against nurses and midwives alone was in excess of 5,000, and all my colleagues here have set out the assaults against their members, that is incredible and is requiring of some scrutiny of the HSA’s viewpoint and the lens through which it views the health service.