Liam Twomey (Wexford, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

First and foremost, our sympathies are with the parents of these children and those experiencing many other regrettable outcomes that are happening in our health services every day, unfortunately. Resources make a difference, but for years we have failed to take on board issues around governance, how we manage our health service and how we deliver our health services. All too often, I have sat in this House for the past 12 years and watched as hundreds of millions were poured into our health services, but nothing was ever done to tackle the clear problems in terms of how we delivered health services and how they were managed.

This applies not just to health staff such as doctors and nurses. It applies, in particular, to management as well. There are issues around how we are training young doctors. We have loads of young doctors but we are missing out completely in how we manage our postgraduate training of doctors. Therefore, many of them are leaving this country in their droves. We have issues around how we manage risk in our health services. All too often, when there is a crisis like this, and we are hearing it in the House again tonight, people look for a lynching rather than accept that these sort of things happen. We need to have a proper culture in respect of how we manage these matters.

In the airline industry, a person can make a mistake and no one looks to fire that person from the job. The industry wants the person to come clean on it and to talk about it in order to ensure that the same mistakes are not repeated in some other airline and planes do not keep falling out of the sky until someone cops on to what is going on. We do not have that culture in this country. We have a culture of blaming people too quickly. We need to change radically the way we approach these things.

There are big issues around the way teams work in our hospitals. Sometimes they just do not function at all and there is little communication in what should be a streamlined service, but that is not happening. One of the best results I have seen coming out of this report so far is the Minister saying he will link Portlaoise hospital with the Coombe hospital. This is the first time someone is saying we need to streamline how we deliver services. Deputy Kelleher is now in the Chamber, but when I was here first, the report published by Fianna Fáil was the Hanly report. The Hanly report was very much about closing down these types of services, taking out what they described as small hospitals and having super hospitals, possibly based in Dublin, Cork and Galway.

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