Mary Harney (Dublin Mid West, Independent)

Furthermore, this case was seen by the chief medical officer and his team as an isolated case. It was not regarded as something that affected other areas. To put this in context, I refer to the Port Laoise issue in September 2008. As a result of the patient safety implications that arose, I set up new protocols in the Department for dealing with patient safety issues, because I frequently get letters from Members, doctors, health care professionals, patients and lawyers suggesting patient safety is at risk. I am not competent to deal with those issues and neither are the administrative people in the Department. The people competent to deal with the issue are medics and that is why this is being overseen by the chief medical officer. The protocols are working very well. At any one time, there could be a significant number of issues and currently there are up to 120. Many of these are resource issues, but others are situations where misdiagnosis has been alleged. These must all be properly investigated.

In May 2010, prior to any of this coming into the public domain, it was decided that an elite clinician in the field of obstetrics would be appointed by the HSE to have appropriate clinical pathways, just as we are doing with heart failure and stroke -----

See this speech in context