Call to set up watchdog for patient safety

Fine Gael and Labour are to press for the establishment of a new patient safety watchdog to oversee standards in hospitals, nursing homes and other facilities in the wake of the Leas Cross report and a number of other health service controversies.

Fine Gael and the Labour Party have tabled a joint private members motion for debate in the Dáil, calling for the establishment of a Patient Safety Authority.

The proposed authority would set standards, investigate complaints, carry out quality reviews of services and "facilitate" whistleblowers.

Fine Gael health spokesman Dr Liam Twomey said the shortcomings exposed in the Lourdes hospital inquiry, the report on the death of Pat Joe Walsh, the case of Peter McKenna, the Leas Cross investigation and others showed "a clear need for a new approach to the monitoring and regulating of standards of patient care".

"The safety of the patient must be paramount. We need a patient's watchdog with real teeth and clear responsibilities. The people employed, or contracted, to provide care are accountable for the quality and standard of care which they provide," he said.

Labour Party spokeswoman on health Liz McManus said a new independent, co-ordinated and standardised approach to patient safety was needed.

She said this should have provisions for clear accountability - including political accountability - and enforcement.

The Government is expected to argue that legislation to establish the Health Information and Quality Authority and to put the the Social Services Inspectorate on a statutory basis will be enacted early next year.

Meanwhile, a management consultant who carried out the first outside report into the Leas Cross nursing home has said that suffering of residents, which was revealed in RTÉ's Prime Time investigation, could have been avoided if information already in the possession of the local health board had been acted upon.

Martin Hynes said yesterday that when he was commissioned in October 2003, he had been told by the then Northern Area Health Board that it had received no complaints about Leas Cross.

However, he said, he had subsequently learned the health board had received complaints going back to 2000.

Mr Hynes told The Irish Times he took issue with the position of the Health Service Executive (HSE) that the problems at Leas Cross had been caused by a "systems failure".

He said that "the system had not failed but that people had failed".

He believed that it would have been possible for individuals to be held accountable for their actions in relation to Leas Cross.

Mr Hynes said that initially health board inspectors had recommended that Leas Cross should not be registered and had set out 14 reasons for this view.

He said later the health board had decided that it should be registered without any conditions.

Mr Hynes also said that, even at present, only one-third of nursing home inspection teams contained multidisciplinary expertise and included medical, nursing and environmental health personnel.

Meanwhile, the HSE said yesterday that it would meet the families of patients who had been resident at Leas Cross to hear their concerns.

This meeting, to be facilitated by the Patient Focus group, will take place within a fortnight.

Some families have said that the report by Prof Des O'Neill left a number of questions unanswered.

Other families believe that health service staff had to be held accountable for their actions.