Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Senator for raising this important matter and for the opportunity to update the House on the response to the recommendations of the HIQA report on the unannounced inspection of Tallaght hospital.
As Minister for Health, I take the prevention and control of health care associated infections very seriously and I welcome the publication of this report. Health care associated infections represent a major cause of preventable patient harm and, in some cases, death and increased health care costs. Since late 2012, HIQA has been carrying out a monitoring programme based on the national standards for the prevention and control of health care associated infections in hospitals throughout the country. On foot of these inspections, HIQA's reports provide an independent assessment of hospital hygiene and identify areas where hospitals need to improve.

On 17 July last the Health Information and Quality Authority carried out an unannounced inspection of Franks Ward and the William Stokes Unit in Tallaght and several of non-compliance issues were identified, including hand hygiene compliance, maintenance work programmes in the two wards and certain processes relating to infection control monitoring. I understand the hospital responded speedily to clarify the issues raised by HIQA and outline the remedial actions taken in response to the non-compliance issues identified.

On 28 August the hospital was re-inspected by HIQA to examine the level of progress made in the two clinical areas inspected in July. The recently published HIQA report acknowledges that overall significant improvements were observed during the reinspection in August, indicating that Tallaght is working towards addressing the issues raised in the first report. Positive steps include: hand hygiene training; a refurbishment and repair programme for the two wards subject to the inspections; commissioning a Legionella risk assessment; recruiting a specialist post to re-establish the surgical site surveillance programme; a local policy for the prevention of nosocomial invasive aspergillosis and the recruitment of a full time locum microbiologist to enhance the hospital's clinical microbiological services.

I understand that the application of these measures will be monitored as part of Tallaght hospital's ongoing quality improvement plan to ensure consistent progress on improvement. The hospital has further committed to resolving any outstanding issues relating to HIQA's report in the coming weeks. I am confident that Tallaght hospital remains fully committed to ensuring the highest level of compliance to the national standards for the prevention and control of health care-associated infections.

The role of the Department of Health is to put in place the correct policies, legislate for them and drive the programme for Government. Some years ago inspections like this never took place. When I was working in health care there was no HIQA or the authority was just starting off and hospitals were left to their own devices. Now, we have a far better situation because we have legislated for HIQA, the authority is in place and it goes in to hospitals and carried out inspections unannounced and holds them to account. Sometimes people read about these reports in the newspapers and may think it is a sign of a bad health service. Actually, in many ways it is a sign of a good health service because we now have a regulator that goes into hospitals, institutions for the disabled and mental health institutions to find out what is wrong, document it and then requires hospitals to act on the problems before going back to re-inspects them. This is a major improvement in our health services, although perhaps some people do not see it that way.