The appointment of a health care ombudsman has been recommended by one of the groups involved in drafting Health Strategy 2001. The ombudsman would deal with grievances raised by users and providers of the health service.
The recommendation has come from the Quality in Health Care subgroup of the Health Strategy Consultative Forum set up by the Minister for Health.
A member of the forum, Mr Austin Leahy, Professor of Health Science and Management at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and consultant vascular surgeon at Beaumont Hospital, believes quality initiatives must emerge. "We must place quality measures at the centre of all new initiatives," he said. "In the short term we are likely to see the need for doctors to become more transparently accountable."
He said this would put pressure on clinicians and others to devise quality strategies for any developments they planned.
Mr Leahy said the Freedom of Information Act was a potential barrier to fully engaging health professionals in quality initiatives. He pointed to the need for the Republic to follow the Australian model. Two amendments to Australia's Freedom of Information Act - aimed at protecting healthcare quality data - reassured clinicians and ensured a greater participation in quality strategies.
The e-health subgroup of the consultative forum has proposed a health intranet to make it easier for GPs to track their patients in hospital and "to monitor individual hospital waiting lists", Mr Leahy added.
By opening up information technology systems, people would also be given access to information based on a unique patient identifier.
"If we want to achieve a more patient-centred health system we must invite people to comment on our services and to suggest improvement," he said, adding there were lessons to be learnt from industry which sought out complaints so as to improve performance.