Darren O'Rourke (Meath East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the points that have been made in terms of the engagement, the movement on behalf of the Minister and the need, if required, for additional time. I welcome that there seems to be some movement on the part of the Minister but the devil will be in the detail. Programmatic audits are not a new concept in the HSE or elsewhere. The question is what those programmatic audits trigger. When individual errors or issues are identified, what does that trigger? We need to be careful to recognise that these audit processes are not a new concept. They have been designed and used for the development of learning organisations, and for the improvement of systems, screening programmes or whatever else it may be, but we want a cultural change here. We want to ensure that at the heart of those system decisions is a recognition that there is a human there - a patient who is an individual - and it is her information as much as it is the learning system's information.

There is work to be done. It would be some progress to see an automatic need to notify people but we need to stress-test that with those people who have direct dreadful experience of the existing system. I hope the Minister will be open to that type of discussion in the time ahead.

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