Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Sinn Féin will be supporting this Bill. It is technical in nature and it is not the most glamorous legislation but it is very important nonetheless, providing as it does the amendment of certain provisions of the Health and Social Care Professionals Act 2005 relating to the recognition of non-Irish professional qualifications.

There have been many Bills seeking to amend the Health and Social Care Professionals Act 2005 over recent months, and important changes have been made to that legislation regarding physical therapists and physiotherapists. The Minister of State outlined for us here the work done to date on bringing in counsellors and psychotherapists. This is an issue that I have discussed with Minister, Deputy Harris, on a number of occasions and one that has been well rehearsed in the media. It has relevance to the legislation we were discussing last week in that until there is regulation of what are commonly known as rogue crisis pregnancy agencies, we will still have people purporting to call themselves counsellors, experts and every other thing and telling women who access terminations that abortion can lead to cancer. That needs to be addressed.

I welcome the work that has been done to date, as outlined by the Minister of State. I assure him of the support of Sinn Féin in anything that he does to bring some regulation into this area. In a couple of weeks, the hope rather than the expectation is that the heat will go out of the issue of discussing abortion. We have been discussing it for a long time. This is one of the loopholes that need to be closed. There are other things relating to sex education in schools and so on. This is a very important one. I very much welcome the work done to date and commit my party to working with the Minister of State to ensure that regulation is brought in.

The core legislation that we are amending is important. The Act provides for the statutory regulation of 17 designated health and social care professions by way of statutory protection of professional titles, confining their use solely to the persons granted that registration. The structure of the system of statutory regulation comprises registration boards, a committee structure dealing with disciplinary matters, and a health and social care professionals council with overall responsibility for the regulatory system. These bodies, collectively known as CORU, are responsible for protecting the public by regulating health and social care professionals in this State. CORU is also charged with the promotion of high standards of professional conduct, and education, training and competence among the registrants.

The Bill is short and technical and provides for all non-Irish professional qualifications which have been recognised by the Minister and by bodies acting on behalf of the State prior to the introduction of the statutory regulation of health and social care professionals to continue to be recognised for the purposes of registration under this Act. This will allow holders of this qualification to be registered statutorily and to practise their professions. The existing legislation does not allow for the registration of non-EU persons or persons with non-EEA qualifications whose qualifications have previously been recognised here. There is a gap to that extent in the current legislation and the Bill rectifies that. It is important that we tie up these loose ends because the social care professionals who are affected need security so that they can register and patients also need security in this regard.

The regulatory bodies that we have in the health area comprise CORU, the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Ireland, NMBI, and the Medical Council. For various reasons, I am aware of the functions of all of those boards, as no doubt is the Minister of State. For a brief period I represented some of the workers in An Bord Altranais. I know the work that goes on among them in terms of research, regulation, and educational support and provision. Among the health professionals who pay a fee every year to be registered, however, there are those who often feel aggrieved. If the Minister of State checks social media tonight, he will see a particular group feature. That is not the reason I raised the issue as it was in my head to raise it anyway. Such people feel there is a very heavy emphasis on regulation, fitness to practise inquiries and the punitive aspects rather than on support. We could talk all day about these matters and I know the Minister of State will profoundly disagree with me, but I believe the Government and previous Governments have made sure that the health service is a very unattractive place for health and social care professionals to work in.

That is not helped by the atmosphere that can be created by paying every month or paying every year into an organisation for which one sees no real benefit. I do not say there is not a benefit because I know that there is. I know that the men and women who work for those boards work hard and they do a lot of good work, but very often that is not seen by the professionals who are subject to the board. What people see on the news is the hearings. We could discuss all day whether the hearings should be in public or private, but they are in public. People see their colleagues on the news being brought before their professional body and it is tough on them. I remember every single case I ever took to An Bord Altranais because of the significant toll they took on the individuals concerned. Many colleagues of those individuals were asked to give evidence and the business is conducted with the authority of a court and it is a very formal environment for people who work hard to have to face. Errors can happen because of a shortage of staff. It is not the fault of the people who turn up to work. They are the ones that are there, and it is the fault of the HSE and the Government that the health service is not an attractive place to work. Where there is short staffing and errors occur, people are constantly worried and then they get to pay for the privilege of having a body to regulate them.

Regulation is extremely important and I back it, but in discussing the regulatory bodies it would be remiss of me not to say that notwithstanding the good work they do, they are not viewed as an ally or an asset by many healthcare professionals. They are viewed as a sort of big brother because the good work they do is rarely seen but the public trials and fitness-to-practise hearings are always visible, and the reputation and public perception of the bodies is based on that.

Some years ago, An Bord Altranais put up the fees for the registration of nurses and there was a campaign by the trade union to have the decision reversed. In every workplace I went to people asked me why they were paying An Bord Altranais. They said their workplace was short-staffed and if there was an error, they would have to go to the board they pay for to account for things that are not necessarily their fault. People make complaints when errors happen, which they do for a variety of reasons, but nurse after nurse and midwife after midwife have come to me to ask why they are paying for that. They said they are working hard to earn their money, to pay money to those people who are going to regulate them, and they could find themselves accounting for something that genuinely might not be their fault and could be due to a systems error, short-staffing or any one of a number of reasons.

Sinn Féin will support the legislation. We are actively looking forward to the legislation regulating counsellors and psychotherapists but I urge the Minister of State, Deputy Jim Daly, to do more to promote the good work that is done by the regulatory bodies or even to have a discussion with them to bring home to them the reality of how they are viewed in their own communities because that is not always evident. There should not be an adversarial relationship between the healthcare professional and his or her regulatory body because there is an element of support and education available and that is very often not seen by many of the people who are regulated.

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