Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Several meaningful pieces of work are going on, such that we can, in the first instance, reduce adverse events as much as possible. That is not just on a one-off basis, to which Deputy Shortall alluded, but it is so we have a culture, training and processes in place such that continuous learning and feedback happen to constantly identify and eliminate the causes of adverse events, while accepting in a health service things will unfortunately inevitably go wrong, hopefully as rarely as possible. Things will not always work out. In those situations, it is first and foremost that the patient is told what happened and told in a way designed to work for the patient and not for anybody else.

If there is a situation where compensation is warranted, it is important that there is a process in place. Anyone has recourse to the courts, but that should not be the only recourse. We should have more appropriate processes in place that start and end with the patient.

I agree with colleagues that this is a journey. Some really important things have happened in terms of services being put in place and changes made. Tonight is an important step but only one step on a journey to getting our health service where we want it to be, whereby patients get the best outcomes, have the best experience of our health service, including those dealing with extremely difficult situations, and, critically, when things go wrong, that there are appropriate patient-centred supports and processes in place to deal with those.

I thank colleagues again. It has been a very constructive debate. I thank the Leas-Cheann Comhairle for facilitating the debate and the additional amendments tonight. Finally, I go back to where we started and thank the patients who have worked so hard to ensure we got to where we are this evening.

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