Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy O'Reilly. I did not have a chance to watch the RTÉ "Prime Time" programme but I have read about Alison McCormack's case online over the last couple of days. I deeply regret the way in which she was treated by our health service, by St. James's Hospital and by members of my own profession. I offer her my sympathies. I thank her for her bravery in coming forward and in making her case public so that lessons can be learned and mistakes not repeated. I also wish her the very best in her recovery.

As Deputy O'Reilly has acknowledged, it is a very sad truth that as long as we have a health service that is run by people with the help of machines there will be human error and there will be machine error. This is the truth. The important thing, however, is that where errors occur they are admitted, that hospitals and clinicians are honest about their errors and that they are identified and minimised. In this case it appears that the patient in question was not informed that a misdiagnosis had occurred and this is wrong. There is a duty of candour to inform patients if a mistake has occurred. In order to reinforce this, just in the last few months the Oireachtas passed legislation to protect open disclosure. I appreciate that this law was not in place at the time but it is now in place. We now expect from our hospitals - from management and from clinicians - that they engage in the duty of candour and tell patients when mistakes have occurred. This House has passed that legislation in the past few month to protect open disclosure so that managers, doctors and other are not concerned that engaging in open disclosure could be used against them in court at a future point.

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