Micheál Martin (Cork South-Central, Fianna Fail)

First of all, there has to be accountability. I would agree with the Deputy in that respect. Also, one would have thought that the era of an individual consultant being an independent republic was long gone. That is clearly not the case in the context of these reports and the one from which the Deputy has been quoting, which is the subject matter of The Sunday Times articles, if I am correct.

The imperative of multidisciplinary teams being in place across the entire system cannot be overstated. That report the Deputy referred to, which I had a look at late last night, is deeply worrying. It relates to a whole range of issues but the more fundamental one, in terms of the overall context of the language the Deputy used, really speaks to an environment that is, to put it mildly, not optimal for the safety of patients, and an absence of a proper team-based, holistic ethos within the CHI group and within the hospital in particular.

The Minister said earlier that governance was an issue of fundamental concern to her also. We need an immediate clinical follow-up for those impacted by the hip surgery and pelvic surgery and then, in addition to that, we need accountability and to find out why and how so many children who did not require operations had operations.

Third, the Minister has appointed or is in the process of appointing two members of the HSE board to the CHI board. We have to evolve the governance now of CHI, conscious that we are moving to a new hospital as well, which in itself will demand significant governance standards and capacity. We have to do so in a way that does not disrupt the thousands of procedures that are ongoing within CHI. A new CEO has come on board there. We have to work with the new CEO. I know the Minister and the HSE will work closely to buttress and underpin governance now in the short term within CHI.

We will have to look at a sensible evolutionary pathway to change governance.

I would make the overall point that, in health historically, institutions have been too strong, to the detriment of patients. In education, the big revolution was that the learner became central to education, not the institutions. In health, the patient must be central, not the ethos of any particular foundation, any particular historic hospital or whatever else. Invariably, new structures get formed to accommodate the historical background of certain hospitals. That is what has happened essentially in terms of CHI. We need to move on and evolve this into a proper governance framework.

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