Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Managing a health service in any country always throws up significant challenges at different times because mistakes are made and need to be fixed. Lessons must be learned and we must constantly improve how we provide healthcare services. Those challenges are consistent across every developed country. We spend €16 billion per year on healthcare and there is a constant demand for change and improvement. When mistakes are made, the Government must be held to account in how it fixes those errors and learns lessons from them. The cost overrun for the national children's hospital has been mentioned and we have commissioned PwC to look in detail at how that has occurred.

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