Catherine Martin (Dublin Rathdown, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Tá an Comhaontas Glas sásta tacaíocht a thabhairt don rún seo. Today, the people of Ireland do not have trust in the most essential and basic of State services, the health service. The stories we have heard in the past two weeks are beyond shocking. It is a harrowing and frightening fact that women have been treated in such a way. The heartbreaking stories of Vicky Phelan and of Emma Mhic Mhathúna have shaken the nation to its core and we are indebted to their courage and honesty in the face of unimaginably difficult circumstances.

Stephen Teap learned last week that his late wife, Irene, was one of the women who received false negative test results in 2010 and 2013. She passed away last year without ever knowing. When Stephen was told of his wife's false negative tests, the news was followed only by a goodbye, with no meaningful support provided to him in his time of greatest need. Has nothing been learned? Where is the support and compassion? All of the women concerned and their families deserve full and transparent answers on everything that happened in respect of CervicalCheck. They need justice because Vicky and Emma and their families, all of whom have shown great courage and their honesty, deserve nothing less.

It is now a matter for each and every Member of the House to ensure the health service is held accountable. To achieve trust, we need an absolute priority to be placed on creating better and prompt communication to women about what their results mean in all cases. The mistrust created by these events needs to be quickly counteracted in order that the damage caused by the CervicalCheck scandal does not dissuade women from coming forward for check-ups. To achieve real trust, the State must stop deciding what is best for women without consulting, asking or empowering them in any meaningful decision and policy-making process. The Government and State as a whole must guarantee that nothing like this ever happens again. The Government must also learn from this scandal. It cannot continue to stumble from crisis to crisis but must commit, as must all Deputies, to real and substantial patient-centred health service reform. We need reform of the current legal resolution process in medicine to move it away from an adversarial legal system that has the potential to cause further trauma for patients and their families. We need to reform the system to ensure it becomes patient-centred and is not dependent on legal recourse.

The Green Party welcomes the motion and agrees that the Government must legislate for mandatory open disclosure of all information when errors occur that affect patient care. We need to place a statutory duty on all officials in the Department of Health and Health Service Executive to provide full information to a health care regulator, statutory agency and Minister in cases of systemic failure in health care. We also need to ensure a statutory duty is imposed on all officials in the Department and HSE, including the Minister for Health and director general of the HSE, to be truthful in any information given to the Health Information and Quality Authority or any relevant statutory agency. The Green Party agrees that these requirements are needed and we will support the motion.

We also need to ensure the goals of all audits conducted are fully realised. We need assurance that when problems and discrepancies are encountered, practices will be improved so as to tackle and resolve them. The State owes it to the women of Ireland never again to let this happen. In the midst of these heartbreaking cases, it is important to remember that the objective evidence is that the national cervical screening programme is reducing the incidence of cervical cancer and the best way to reduce the risk of cervical cancer is to stay within the national programme and vaccinate our daughters.

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