Billy Kelleher (Cork North Central, Fianna Fail)
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505. To ask the Minister for Health the amount of compensation payments made by the HSE on foot of incidents in maternity units in each of the years 2007 to 2016 and to date in 2017, in tabular form; the amount of each individual payment; and the maternity unit in which the incident took place. [26004/17]

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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The management of claims against the Health Service Executive and my Department is delegated under the National Treasury Management Agency Act to the State Claims Agency (SCA), which has a statutory mandate to investigate and manage these cases to completion. The SCA has supplied a report on the information requested by the Deputy. The data is extracted from the National Incident Management System (NIMS), a system which it hosts for the Health Service Executive, other healthcare enterprises and Delegated State Authorities.

The table supplied shows details on all compensation payments made and the number of claims they relate to with regard to Maternity Services in the 19 maternity units nationwide from 2007 to 2017 year to date. The figures include payments related to acute maternity units only and are broken down by hospitals groups as providing such information at a hospital level on a claim by claim basis could have the unfortunate and unintended consequence of causing the State Claims Agency to breach data protection legislation by potentially identifying individual plaintiffs or hospital employees.

Additionally, the State Claims Agency has indicated that this information could have a detrimental effect concerning the financially sensitive management of the active claims portfolio. Finally, the State Claims Agency has concerns that the provision of this information on a hospital by hospital basis could result in non-contextualised league tables giving the public a wrong impression of any individual hospital’s patient quality and safety risk.

It should be noted that:

- The figures relate to compensation payments made to patients and service users only.

- Private healthcare schemes are excluded.

- The compensation payments included can relate to any type of claim where the service has been recorded as Maternity Services, i.e. birth specific procedures, medication errors, hospital acquired infections etc.

- In order to avoid breaches of data protection legislation, some hospital groups have been merged where appropriate to avoid possible identification of individual patients or hospital employees.

- This report is correct as of 29/05/2017.

- It is important to note that payments outlined in the table may be made in relation to a single claim across multiple transactional years and that the total number of individual claims which the payments in this table relate to is 533.