Frank Fahey (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

The complaints officer is a statutorily independent post in the same way as the assessment officer. As I pointed out yesterday, for example, officers of the Department of Social and Family Affairs are statutorily independent. That they are employed by the Department of Social and Family Affairs does not, in any sense, take away from their independence in performing duties, irrespective of the views of the organisation within which they work. The same scenario applies in the case of a complaints officer. In fact, we removed a significant hurdle from the Bill whereby decisions of complaints officer could be appealed by chief executive officers of the former health boards. In order to ensure transparency and less bureaucracy, we decided to remove that provision altogether. The current situation is that a decision of the statutorily independent complaints officer will now go to the appeals officer. The latter is also statutorily independent of the Department of Health and Children, under the provisions of Part 2.

Although we will be dealing with this matter in the next section, a suggestion was made to provide an option of the Ombudsman being the appeals officer. That suggestion was, however, rejected by the DLCG. There is independence in respect of the whole system and the complaints officer is a part of that.