Geraldine Feeney (Fianna Fail)

I, too, welcome the Minister to the House and compliment her on her excellent presentation. The Minister had no notes and spoke on this issue for 22 minutes which tells me she is at home with her brief and knows it intimately. It is obvious it is very much part of the Minister's day to day working life. I do not know of any other Minister who comes to this House and deals as adequately with issues arising from his or her brief.

I am delighted to have an opportunity to contribute to the debate. As the Minister has said, it is timely because unfortunately we have seen an unprecedented amount of negative fallout. We went from the cases in Portlaoise hospital to those of Ms Rebecca O'Malley and Ms Susie Long to the MRSA infections and, in recent days, to the case of the young child in Crumlin who had a kidney removed in error. That last case is the first time that I have heard of so-called wrong site surgery. Apparently there have been only two confirmed cases of it in the UK. It is most uncommon worldwide and I would say that the present case is a first in this jurisdiction. It is terrible and there are no words I can imagine that would console the parents, the young patient or his family concerning what has happened, never mind finding words to try to explain how it occurred. It is most unfortunate. I have no doubt it will be dealt with accordingly.

The Minister mentioned the Medical Practitioners Act which this House passed and which provided for a lay majority for the first time. The Minister was very brave in the face of much negativity from medical personnel and despite receiving a great deal of abuse. Everyone told her she was wrong but she went ahead and pushed the legislation forward. Elections are due to be held which will provide a lay majority. I commend the Minister on that. It was the way to go.

We would not have a hygiene audit were it not for the terrible fallout from MRSA. Again the Minister was brave enough to put this audit in place. She is blamed for everything that goes wrong despite the fact she is not in any of the 52 hospitals on a daily basis and cannot be held responsible for all that goes wrong. For all that, she does try to put things right when things go wrong. She is a woman of actions rather than words. She will say the words but she will also put them into action.

I am glad to see that the Coroners Bill, which was debated in the House in 2007, has classed MRSA as a reportable death. I am even happier that from 4 May, what I would term the new disease, c.diff, will also be a reportable disease and is now listed on the infectious diseases reporting system. We can see now what cases are showing up and which ones are being monitored. It was a shame that the recent cases in Ennis showed the presence of this terrible disease when the post mortems were done. It was a contributing factor in the deaths of those people.

As Senator Fitzgerald remarked, the Health Information and Quality Authority, HIQA, earlier today met the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Health and Children. Everyone was greatly impressed by its presentation, the more so because that organisation is less than a year in operation and had wonderful work to show us. I take my hat off to the people concerned who are all hard-working, committed members. They explained the different areas where changes can be seen. Regarding the placement of children under 12 in residential care, there will be an inspection of each residential unit before a child in that age group is placed in it.

It seems only yesterday but it is two years since this House debated the fallout from the Leas Cross nursing home situation. I was greatly impressed to see what is in place now to monitor and set standards for nursing and residential homes. The residential care people with disabilities receive is also being monitored. All these matters are part of the major reform that is needed. I have no doubt the situation will improve.

The Minister said at the beginning of her presentation that she would like to see us learn from our errors rather than enter into a culture of blame. We always appear ready to jump in and blame someone. Perhaps that is human nature but it would be much better if we could stand back without jumping in and pointing a finger of blame. As the Minister rightly points out, if we adopt this approach and learn from our errors, we will improve much more quickly.

The Minister and referred very briefly in her presentation to the Dr. Neary case and she was in the House for the debate on the repercussions of that. It encompassed more than 20 years of terrible practice but as the Minister pointed out, everyone knew about it yet no one wanted to point a finger. That situation was allowed to occur because of a culture of silence. I do not know what one needs to do to try to break down that culture but I believe the Minister is well on the way to ensuring such a culture is eroded. The Medical Practitioners Act was passed by the previous Seanad, the first such legislation in almost 30 years. Competence assurance was brought in. Had there been such a component before, with requisite medical education for doctors and compulsory professional development programmes, the Neary situation might never have happened and the damage done to all the women who came under his care in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda might never have occurred.