Health service whistleblowers to be protected

WHISTLEBLOWERS in the health service will be protected from being penalised in the workplace or from being sued from next month.

The measure is part of a number of reforms aimed at improving patient safety announced yesterday by Health Minister Mary Harney.

The protection for all healthcare staff making disclosures about patient care is being provided under part of the Health Act that the minister has signed into law.

The minister said the move was the first step in the development of a culture of patient safety as recommended by the Commission on Patient Safety and Quality Assurance.

In their report, published last August, the commission stressed that the culture of patient safety requires transparency, facing facts and a blame-free culture.

Ms Harney also announced that the Government had decided to introduce a licensing system for all hospitals and health facilities, as recommended by the commission, a move that was met with widespread approval.

She said the system, which would be self-financing, would establish mandatory standards that would be legally required for all health facilities.

Because the legislation was complex, it would be 2011 or 2012 before it came into force, said Ms Harney.

The minister pointed out that the Health Information and Quality Authority would commence nursing home registration and inspections later this year.

Ms Harney said the Government also supported the immediate establishment of a steering group chaired by the department’s chief medical officer, Dr Tony Holohan, to drive the implementation of the commission’s 134 recommendations.

The recommendations also include a mandatory system of adverse event reporting, legal protection for open disclosure undertaken in good faith, exemption from Freedom of Information legislation and legal discovery of data collected solely for the purposes of improving safety and quality of healthcare.

Ms Harney said the aim was to encourage reporting adverse events, learn from them and make the necessary corrections so that patients were better protected.

A report made in good faith with a view to improving the quality of patient care had to protected. “If we do not treat them as confidential in every sense of the word, that will not happen,” she said.

Ms Harney said the Government also strongly supported improved governance in hospitals and, in particular, the introduction of systematic audit of clinical practice and outcome for patients.

Had such a system been in place, practices that had catastrophic effects on patients, including the patterns of interventions by obstetrician Dr Michael Neary at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda would have been picked up earlier, she said.

Dr Neary was struck off the medical register in 2003 for unnecessarily removing the wombs and ovaries of patients.