Martin pressured to introduce medical negligence bill

Opposition parties today increased pressure on the Government to introduce the new Medical Practitioners Bill following last night's Prime Timeprogramme that revealed widespread negligence within the health service.

The Minister for Health, Mr Martin, said today he was "extremely concerned" at the findings of the programme, which claimed up to 14,000 people each year may be injured or killed as a direct result of mistakes by doctors and other health workers. The figures were based on a 1999 study by Harvard University.

The minister said he was "aware of a number of the issues" that were revealed, and insisted Department officials were actively addressing them.

He said the heads of the Medical Practitioners Bill - which will create a competence assurance scheme for medical professionals - were almost complete and would be circulated in the near future. He originally promised in July that he would be publishing the legislation in the current Dáil term but today conceded it would not be enacted until the end of 2004.

Mr Martin also said today the new Clinical Indemnity Scheme will "fundamentally change" the way incidents of clinical negligence are reported. There is no national system for reporting adverse events at present.

The Medical Council is heading calls for changes to the legislation governing medical malpractice. The council's president, Prof Gerard Bury, said in September at a report into the Neary case that monitoring of doctors who operated independent practice was "totally and completely absent". There was nothing, he said, to stop another Dr Neary case happening.

Labour and the Greens today called for the immediate introduction of the Bill.

Labour's health spokeswoman, Ms Liz McManus, described the findings as "shocking" and called for an analysis on the impact of mistakes on patient care. "I urge the Minister for Health to bring forward the Bill which will provide the mechanism for complaints to be dealt with in a more satisfactory and effective manner," she said.

The Green Party chairman and health spokesman, Mr John Gormley, said the Government had promised to discuss the Bill at Cabinet last October, yet had failed to do so.

"The Medical Practitioners Bill would ensure that complaints from patients could be properly addressed," he said. "If the Minister is genuinely interested in protecting the rights and interests of patients he will speed up introduction of this legislation."

Ms Olivia Mitchell, the spokeswoman on health for Fine Gael, said Prime Timeshowed there was a need for a "completely new culture of self-reporting" in hospitals. She said there was a "conspiracy of silence" within the health service when it came to issues of negligence.