HSE ‘lied to parents’ over deaths at Portlaoise Hospital
Health Minister Leo Varadkar said HSE director general Tony O’Brien had decided to bring in an independent investigator to find out why issues were not passed to those higher up.
Mr Varadkar said that he expected the terms of reference for the inquiry would be drawn up either this week or the next and the report would be completed in three months.
Mr O’Brien told a meeting of the Oireachtas Health Committee last week there were many issues at the hospital had been escalated.
“They didn’t always find their way to the right decision-making levels and this must be investigated in accordance with fair procedures,” he said.
Speaking on RTÉ radio yesterday, Mr Varadkar admitted that parents of babies who died at Portlaoise Hospital were “lied to” by people who have been accused of covering up what happened to their children.
He said he found it extremely worrying and appalling that the parents were not dealt with honestly.
Some of the parents who did complain were told that their child’s death was the only one of its kind when this was not the case.
Mr Varadkar said the only way to reduce risk was to ensure a health service culture where health professionals at all levels were honest about their mistakes .
He also said people must see complaints as an opportunity to improve patient experience and patient care and not as something that needs to be dismissed.
“It is my view that complaints have not always been handled very well and that is the whole point of establishing a patient advocacy service,” he said.
Mr Varadkar said the HSE still disputed some of the Hiqa investigation findings.
Both his department and the HSE have accepted Hiqa’s eight recommendations but he believed the HSE disputed some of the points of detail, which would be dealt with separately.
One of the recommendations is that the Department of Health should establish a steering group to oversee the implementation of the recommendations across the health service.
Mr Varadkar said a patient representative would be included on the committee.
Hiqa wanted the independent patient advocacy patient service up and running by May next year but he would like to have it established sooner than that.
He also wanted to have the legal status for the hospital groups in place in a matter of months and hoped to have the planned national maternity strategy published by the end of the year.
The country’s maternity service would follow the cancer care model — it would be a programme that would fund and audit maternity services. He hoped to have the framework in place by the end of the year.
Mr Varadkar said he was not ruling out the possibility that some maternity units might be closed when services are re-organised.
“I can’t rule the possibility that it make make sense for reasons of patient outcome and patient safety to close some of them but I don’t have a number in mind because I don’t have enough information to answer that question at this stage.”
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