Mary Harney (Dublin Mid West, Progressive Democrats)

We have not signed off on it yet. Senator Fitzgerald will be interested to know they welcomed the paediatric element and the ambulatory care centre in the statement released last week.

There are no inspection processes for the public and private health care systems at the moment, though I would love to have given the Health Information and Quality Authority a role with regard to the private sector. It has a role when the State procures public services. I cannot legally do this until there is a licensing or accreditation regime. If there are no rules by which one establishes a service one cannot send in a person to inspect it; what criteria would they apply to it? This is why we established a patient safety commission, with many patient representatives, and others, chaired by Dr. Deirdre Madden, that is due to report in June 2008. After that report I envisage legislation to establish in Ireland a long overdue licensing or accreditation regime for health provision. Anybody can build and run a hospital in this country and that is not satisfactory.

For the first time HIQA will inspect the private and public nursing home sectors. Heretofore we only inspected private nursing home facilities but not public facilities. There must be a one for all policy whether it applies to admission to the public hospital system or standards of care. There should be only one system in place and patients are entitled to expect that the Minister for Health and Children and her Department will set up a regime that guarantees quality and safety will drive service provision. They must trust that, regardless of who funds provisions, it will be monitored and enforced on the same basis.

I regret that we have rushed this legislation and admit this is never a good idea. As a legislator, I like to give a good deal of time to legislation and we rarely see guillotined motions relating to health provisions, although it has happened occasionally when it was important to establish organisations. However, this Bill has only been prepared since 26 October and went before Cabinet for approval on 4 December. This was the timeframe facing me and it would have been irresponsible of me to ignore the Attorney General's legal advice, putting at risk €900 million of expenditure, thousands of jobs for people employed in these organisations and many contracts that these organisations have. Only on the day we published the legislation, when I briefed the Opposition, did we inform the relevant organisations because we knew if we had informed them 24 or 48 hours earlier many people would have been worried. Staff would have worried about the status of their employment and contractors and patients would also have worried. Sometimes it is necessary to do things this way, as longstanding Members of this House will understand. It is not desirable but sometimes things must be done quickly to protect the public interest.

I thank the Senators for an interesting debate and look forward to Committee and Remaining Stages tomorrow.