Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy. It is a very fair question. The answer to that is that there are extensive patient safety and clinical governance mechanisms in place in all our hospitals to do with every procedure. In this case, two serious incident reviews have been kicked off. They will be reporting very shortly. They have done extensive work on what happened in two particular cases. Concerns were raised through the multidisciplinary team. That kicked off an internal and external review. A complaint has been made to the Irish Medical Council. The Irish Medical Council is now carrying out its own work.

Neither the chief clinical officer nor I were satisfied that the internal and external reviews sufficiently answered the questions. I agree with much of what has been said this evening about the reviews not identifying what went wrong. Those two reports are useful in terms of ensuring everything that should be happening is happening, but as Deputy Shortall alluded to, they did not call out what went wrong. As such, Dr. Colm Henry and I were not satisfied that the questions had been answered to the level they needed to be. That is why this additional review is being carried out.

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