Liam Twomey (Wexford, Fine Gael)

Patients are still dying from MRSA in our hospitals and the HSE, which the Minister has put in charge of our health services, has only draft guidelines to deal with the issue. MRSA is not something that happened today or yesterday. The death of Mr. P.J. Walsh at Monaghan General Hospital was also described as a systems failure, but it was, in some respects, a result of the failure of the Government to provide the people in the north east with a proper health service.

The Minister's failures are in the area of legislation. Fine Gael and the Labour Party have promoted the idea of a patient safety authority. The Minister has caused some confusion in this regard. The explanatory memorandum to the Medical Practitioners Bill states that an explicit definition of the role of the Medical Council is that it is the competent authority to protect the public interest. I believe the public interest is best protected by the setting up of a patient safety authority.

I urge the Minister to take this on board because of the complexities we have discussed, not just the complexities within the medical profession but also those within nursing. Nurses are becoming more autonomous because of the way we want the health service to work and in a few short months they will have the responsibility of prescribing for patients. Physiotherapists and occupational therapists must be considered also. Our health care system is rapidly evolving and the Minister must keep in step with it.

The Minister has not shown great commitment in Government to keeping in step with these changes as evidenced by the fact that the legislation promoted in the health care strategy in November 2001 has yet to be implemented to a significant degree to protect patients in our health care system. Therefore, in some respects it is the Government that is letting down patients in the area of trust.

There is one subject we should discuss, namely, how the Minister does a disservice to our 9,000 doctors. She has never spoken about the Medical Practitioners Bill without directly relating it to what happened in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital and the Neary report. Nobody justifies what Dr. Neary did, but demonising everybody by continually mentioning the Bill and the Neary report together tries to sell the message that every doctor is somehow a Dr. Neary in sheep's clothing. It is regrettable the Minister has taken this line because the majority of doctors are fully behind the Bill and have been calling for it for the past 20 years. If there are discussions about minor points of it, then they should be seen as such. The Minister should not try to kill all discussion by saying that if somebody goes against aspects of this Bill, he or she is somehow a supporter of the behaviour in which Dr. Neary was involved.

One would not know from reading the transcripts from the Medical Council whether the three consultants who went to Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital were stupid, arrogant or naive. I do not know what was in their minds. They did not go there as consultant doctors looking after patients. Most would say that the three involved are good and compassionate doctors, but when they went to Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital they crossed another boundary. They went as experts and exonerated a colleague who should not have been exonerated.

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