Hildegarde Naughton (Galway West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with Deputy Durkan. I want to begin by acknowledging the anxiety that many young patients and their families will be feeling this week, particularly the young patients who are directly involved in these reviews and incidents, as well as their parents and their families.

Openness, transparency and learning for patients and families must be at the heart of our health service. These families must continue to be our priority as we move forward with a response to what has happened. I also want to take this opportunity to offer my deepest condolences to the parents and family of Dollceanna Carter on the loss of their beautiful daughter and sister. There are many other families, parents and children attending CHI at Temple Street for appointments and procedures this week, or who are waiting to hear about an appointment. It is vitally important that their concerns and questions are addressed in a comprehensive response that is now under way.

I also recognise the frustration of families of patients who are waiting for surgery for spina bifida and scoliosis in particular, and the impact this wait continues to have on their daily lives. This Government has invested and will continue to invest significant funding to help clinicians reduce the amount of time children are waiting for important hospital appointments and procedures. Scoliosis and spina bifida have been identified as a priority in both the 2022 and 2023 waiting list action plans, with significant investment provided to increase capacity and staffing. Last year, there was a commitment of some €19 million of current and capital funding to tackle these waiting lists by improving the patient’s journey and creating additional capacity.

I welcome the request by the Minister, Deputy Stephen Donnelly, that the HSE explores all options to increase capacity for this vital service, including outsourcing care both at home and abroad. The Department of Health continues to work with the HSE and CHI to drive progress on the waiting list action plan. I would like to assure children and their families that the Department of Health and the HSE remain committed to reducing the amount of time children are waiting for hospital appointments and procedures. I welcome the offer by the Minister, Deputy Stephen Donnelly, to meet with families who are directly impacted, as well as with the advocacy groups who work so hard on behalf of children with spina bifida and scoliosis and their families. I welcome that meetings will be happening this week.

Listening to the voices and experiences of families and patients, as well as to those who advocate and care for them, are vital parts of how we learn and improve the quality of safety of our health services. I welcome the fact that the voices and views of these families and advocacy groups will be heard by Mr. Nayagam, the international expert who will be carrying out this important review. It is important that these young patients and their families continue to be the priority and be at the heart of this process. As the Minister has outlined, there are a number of investigations and processes under way to establish facts and find answers to the many questions we all have. I concur that it is important that the findings from these various processes are not pre-judged and that they are allowed to be conducted and completed in a fair and objective manner. These reports and their findings will be important to enable Mr. Nayagam to progress with his review. They will assist him in identifying the necessary learnings and improvements to be made in the service for the future and to ensure that the experiences of patients and their families can be continuously improved.

These events have highlighted even further the need for openness and transparency and the need to ensure that the patient's voice is the heart of everything we do in the health sector in Ireland. Our priority now is to ensure that the patient safety concerns that have come to light are comprehensively addressed, that patients and families receive the assurances they deserve and that they are receiving high-quality patient-centred care.

When things go wrong in our health services, it is vital that we have the systems in place to respond to them, to find answers for patients, their families and staff about what happened and why and, most importantly, to identify the ways we can learn for the wider health services. This is essential for us to continue to improve the safety and quality of all our services.

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