Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Minister did not make the point that I had thought he would make. I am actually more shocked now – perhaps it is the lateness of the hour or maybe I gave him surplus credit. I assumed he would say an apology would happen anyway and the provider would apologise, so there would be no need to make him or her apologise. Instead, the Minister's explanation has been rather shocking. He said that it is up to every individual provider to decide whether he or she apologises. He said they should make the decision and that it is eminently reasonable for them to look at it in the context of the circumstances.

The circumstances of an open disclosure meeting are precisely that something has gone wrong and the patient has been impacted. In that scenario, if there are providers working in our health service who do not believe it is appropriate to apologise or who believe they need to individually assess whether to bother giving an apology, I do not believe they should be clinicians in our health service. In any sphere of life it is part of the A,B,C of our culture and interaction as human beings that if someone does something wrong, that person apologises.

I agree with the Minister that the apology should be meaningful - of course it should. The Minister said that if we make providers do it, it will not be genuine. I do not believe that. We are dealing with a dysfunctional organisation that needs to be trained and told. It is regrettable that this is the case. Is it not utterly shocking that we have to tell those involved that this is the case? In any event, that has been the experience of people the length and breadth of the country. In their experience, providers do not want to apologise because they are afraid of litigation and of being held to account. We specifically kept in provisions that protect apologies from litigation and any malpractice cases and so on. The health service providers have nothing to fear by this and everything to gain by improving their relationships with their patients. Then, when something goes wrong they should say they are sorry. They may do it first time around and not like it because they do not have the humility to admit they were wrong, but the circumstances are that the meeting is being held to admit that they were wrong. If the provider cannot offer an apology, the best thing is to train him or her to do so by making it mandatory.

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