Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I want to focus on one important political point that has not received much attention. There is a clear recognition that a mistake was made in 2011 when the HSE board was abolished. That mistake must be rectified and Dr. Scally puts that front and centre. I say this because to a certain extent, we must be careful that in our work we do not always view the public service as bad or believe that structures relating to it will inevitably be bad. At the time, the then Minister for Health, Senator James Reilly, said he would take all the responsibility, that he was sweeping away all those structures and that he would be the great single-handed orchestrator of everything. We must be careful in the political system and we must work with our public servants to make sure we deliver the services our people need.

This colours my second comment, which is that the Scally report has done the country a great service because it highlights a problem in our public service relating to the nature of communications between doctor and patient, particularly, as has been said on several occasions here, between male doctors and female patients in terms of the sharing of information. It concerns attitude. It is very hard to define that, to regulate for it and to be scientific about what empathy is, how one listens and how one fulfils the Hippocratic Oath in sharing information that belongs to a patient with him or her. There is a huge amount of learning here because how we share data in the modern world is of increasing importance, as is the ownership of data. The ability to get access to one's data, particularly health data, should be enshrined after this crisis - this terrible disaster for those patients. Hopefully, we will get one good thing out of it, namely, a system under which patients have full transparency and access to data. Where the State makes a mistake, and in some instances the mistake will be unavoidable because there will be screenings that are inaccurate, we must develop a mechanism whereby the State can share information about those failings without it becoming a legal wrangle and where it is not doing down the State or the public service to admit mistakes. I hope this is at least one positive outcome of what has been a terribly trying process for the more than 250 women involved.

The way in which the report was written, with the women and their comments being put centre stage, was correct. It indicates the general approach we should take in terms of the medical profession, the sharing of data and how the public administrative system works. Dr. Scally has done us a great service, as have those women who did an incredibly difficult thing in speaking publicly about their tragedies. They have done us a service, as has Dr. Scally. We should live up to that in the work we do from now on.

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