Denis Naughten (Roscommon-South Leitrim, Fine Gael)

In January 2007, a new statutory complaints system was established by the HSE. As part of the system, the HSE appointed trained complaints officers to deal with the complaints received. However the system is not working and I commend Deputy Reilly on proposing this evening's motion.

Lack of independence is undermining the system that is in place. In the vast majority of cases, patients do not want compensation. There is an impression that the only reason someone complains is to get money. Most people simply want the truth. They just want answers, and to be assured that if mistakes were made they will not be repeated in the future.

This did not happen in the case of the maternity misdiagnosis scandal. Even when Melissa Redmond went public regarding her misread scan of July 2009, the HSE said the wrong diagnosis of the miscarriage in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda was an extremely rare case. Since then, a dozen women have come forward with their stories of having been wrongly told by maternity hospitals that their babies had been miscarried, only to give birth later to healthy infants. That put a shiver down the spine of every parent and every woman who had a miscarriage in the last number of years.

On foot of that scandal, the HSE received almost 300 telephone calls from concerned women and their families. Here again, health management closes its ranks and lets patients believe it is "all in their heads". Patients would not have the ability to understand the complexities of the procedures involved. People, in the main, are looking for answers and an acknowledgment that they are right. Instead, they are always one explanation away from the truth and, as a result, their own resolve comes into question.

How can our health service improve if there is no acknowledgment of mistakes? Mistakes will happen. People are only human but the failure to accept that medical professionals are human has serious consequences in some instances. A different attitude to complaints within the health system, especially to minor ones, might help to identify serious system errors before they have fatal consequences. Instead of that, someone who complains about the system is considered to be a freak.

A group of parents have been claiming since the 1970s that their children were damaged by State-run vaccination programmes. Eventually, before the last general election and after a long campaign, the then Minister for Health, Deputy Micheál Martin, put a group in place to look at this matter. This led to a report of the vaccine damage steering group. The report has been on Deputy Mary Harney's desk for the last 15 months and she still has not decided if she will implement any of its recommendations. I am talking about elderly parents of children who were profoundly damaged by State-run vaccination programmes. Will the Minister for Health and Children come to the House and acknowledge that the State had some role in this matter? The State was prepared to buy off some of those parents by giving them £10,000 to keep their mouths shut in the early 1980s. Surely it is time the Government honoured those parents and their commitment to their children.

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