Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

To be fair, it is important that I reaffirm the points the Minister of State has made in order that people are aware of the position. The hospital said that the technicians who calibrated the machine over that period of time were of the view that it was in the confidence levels that were required, but it has to be said that the request was made to replace the machine in early 2016, yet the machine was operating until August 2017. I was shocked about that but, on further investigation, I was told it is not unusual for machines to be out of date in hospitals and for the HSE not to provide the funding for those machines to be replaced in a timely fashion. The budgets are not with the hospitals. Therefore, the hospitals cannot purchase the necessary machines, rather they must apply for them. I am of the understanding that the instinct of the hospital initially when it became aware of this particular crisis was to re-echo 450 people who had negative outcomes in their diagnoses based on the echocardiograms.

What has happened is that there has been a flip in the decision of the HSE on whether to re-echo those people. What we have blatantly at the heart of this question are health professionals saying that they do not trust the quality of this diagnostic tool because this diagnostic tool is produced by a machine that is out of date. We have general practitioners, GPs, around the county who make diagnoses on the basis of a diagnostic tool with a disclaimer and then we have the HSE saying that everything is all right.

I ask the Minister to forgive me but when the HSE says that everything is all right in this environment it is not something that we as Deputies can take as read. We have a moral responsibility to push the HSE to make sure everything is all right. To make sure that everything is all right in this case, I believe, would be to make sure that anybody who is at home in County Meath who has had a heart issue diagnosed on the basis of an echocardiogram with a disclaimer has the opportunity to have another echocardiogram and another diagnosis as a result.

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