SIMON HARRIS’S TIRADE AT HEALTH OFFICIALS

He tells of foul-mouthed outbusts over HSE failures I’ll change to rules so bad health managers can be f ired HSE board, abolished by FG, will be set up again And why did he allow that HSE chief’s ‘nixer’

SIMON Harris tells the Irish Mail on Sunday: ‘MY language was unparliamentary,’ in an exclusive interview, in which he reveals how he responded to bombshell information from his chief medical officer. The Health Minister tells – in a no-holds-barred sit-down – of the language he used to his senior officials, amid the anger over the appalling treatment of Vicky Phelan and the other women caught up in the smear test scandal.

He had just been given shocking new information, minutes before entering the Dáil chamber, and speaking in the same office where he vented his fury, he tells the MoS: ‘I had to say to the people… I am now facing a scenario where I can no longer actually believe what people are telling me.

‘Because people are telling me one day that this is the reality, the next day it’s: “No minister, everything you’ve gone out and told people actually may not be the truth.”’

He tells us of his far-reaching plans to reform the chronically dysfunctional health service that is riddled with ‘incompetence’. He plans new ‘accountability legislation’ that will set up a disciplinary board and allow incompetent health managers to be fired.

He also controversially commits to re-establishing, by next January, the HSE board that his predecessor James Reilly abolished in 2012, and give the minister more control over the HSE. The MoS has also learned that the under-pressure HSE chief Ton O’Brien will now quit four weeks earlier than intended, at the start of July, although he faces a Dáil vote of no confidence from Sinn Féin, and Fianna Fáil health spokesman Stephen Donnelly has said he should go.

Mr Harris was about to make a statement to the Dáil about the Cervical Check scandal last Tuesday but 20 minutes beforehand his chief medical officer came into his office to say he had ‘bad news’. Only half of the women with cervical cancer had their tests reviewed to see if the cancer could have been diagnosed earlier. The figure was now over 3,000 rather than 1,482.

‘I like to think that I take my job very seriously, I like to think I work very hard, I like to think I ask very intelligent and probing questions on behalf of the public, but even with all of that, the fact that this had to arise made me mad,’ he says.

But the minister emphasised that while there are people working in pivotal positions in the HSE that he cannot trust and that are incompetent, he does not think the same of his own department officials.

His chief medical officer ‘has done a superb job,’ he says, ‘I genuinely want to say that. He’s taken this thing by the scruff of the neck and tried to get answers and work very closely with me and still is.’

‘The health service had already been reeling from the information that it took a brave woman, Vicky Phelan, to tell her story, after she was incorrectly cleared by Cervical Check of cervical cancer. She is now terminally ill but earlier intervention could have helped her.

Asked whether events were down to conspiracy or cock-up, the minister says: ‘I wouldn’t be having a statutory inquiry if I thought I knew all the answers, I don’t know.’

But there is ‘gross incompetence’ in the health service.

‘The very best case scenario is that a number of people didn’t do what they should have done correctly and that, at the very best, there was incompetence.

‘I mean the idea that 20 minutes before I’d go into the Dáil, trying to put facts out that would, hopefully, give women important information, that I was told that, actually, you know the way, Minister, we told you that for 1,482 cases had been audited and they were all the cases with cervical cancer, well, there’s possibly many, many more cases. And we can’t tell you all about it. And we’re trying to work our way through,’ he says. ‘I’m then faced with this unenviable task: do you tell the Dáil, of course you do, but know, in telling the Dáil, I’m putting more information out there that is going to cause people to be worried. At the very best there was gross incompetence.’

Asked to specify where the key problem in the system lies, he says: ‘I’m not pre-empting the inquiry but I’ve full confidence that everything I have been told by my officials is the truth as they’ve known of it. The reality is that the HSE was set up in a way that it has not been accountable, and just before I met you I had the Irish Patients’ Association in here and I’ve said to them: “Look, I need your help now, I want to work with patient advocacy groups to draw up an accountability law”.

The accountability law will bring health managers onto the same footing as other health professionals.

‘If a doctor does something wrong, then a doctor goes before a medical council hearing and is held to account. If a nurse does something wrong then a nurse goes before a NMBI (Nursing and Midwifery Board of Ireland) hearing and can be held accountable. What if a manager does something wrong? How can we make sure a manager can be held accountable?’ he says.

He will also speak to other patient groups and seek advice.

He adds: ‘When I’ve heard people like Róisín and Mark Molloy, who lost their baby in Portlaoise hospital, when I’ve heard them talk about their experiences, they want to see an accountability law in Ireland. People can tell me “oh, you can’t do that”. Of course you can, they’ve done it in other jurisdictions.’

He says this is not just needed for Cervical Check but on a much broader front.

However, in the midst of his clear frustration, the minister pauses and adds: ‘I do need to say this. Let’s not lose sight of this, there are really good people working in the HSE. And just because the HSE is a brand, there’s lots of people who work in there who do a good job, lots of managers in the HSE, but not

‘My language was unparliamentary’

all managers are equally good. I’m going to call it as I see it, and I tried to do that this week. When I wasn’t satisfied with what I saw I called it out straight.’

He told of the shock when he set in train the events that saw Cervical Check director Gráinne Flannelly step down.

‘Last weekend I was standing beside Leo Varadkar, out in Harold’s Cross Hospice, and I was asked an honest question. Did I have confidence in the management of Cervical Check, and I gave an honest answer, “I can’t say that I do”, and if I’d said anything else it would have been a lie. But even the fact that I said that caused kind of shockwaves across the system.’

But he has said in the past that HSE managers should be removed if they do not ‘measure up’. Will that happen now?

He believes for accountability, the HSE board, abolished by a previous Fine Gael minister James Reilly, needs to be re-established. He will bring legislation to Cabinet to try and make this happen as soon as is practicable.

‘The fact that the HSE has no board is one of the biggest challenges to accountability. So I’ve been working on bringing forward a law that will put in place a HSE board, and I’ll be bringing that to Cabinet this month. I’ve asked the opposition will they help me pass it this year so we can put the board in place in January next year. What I want to do on this board is to pick the best and the brightest people, not just in Ireland and abroad, who can actually ask at board meetings and hold these people to account.

‘People who have actuarial skills, people who have governance skills. I actually want to put in place a board of people who can scrutinise.

‘The minister of the day can never scrutinise everything so you need to be able to put people in place who can.’

The Irish Times revealed on Wednesday that HSE chief Mr O’Brien became a non-executive director of the San Diego-based contraceptive manufacturer Evofem Biosciences while continuing to run the health service. Since then he agreed to stand aside from the board of that company until he leaves the HSE, but does the minister regret agreeing to that ‘nixer’.

‘I think it has been represented in a way that is different to the reality. So, Tony O’Brien has a contract with the Minister for Health, it’s a kind of peculiar one, I’m not a HR department. I don’t mean that flippantly, most people working in the health service would go to their HR department, if Tony O’Brien wants to do some work on his own time he has to seek permission of the minister.

‘And Tony O’Brien, I knew, was coming to the end of his term, was looking to join a board in a nonexecutive role, to do less than five hours’ work a month, for a company that is outside the jurisdiction, that doesn’t do any business with the Irish health service whatsoever or have any products licenced in Ireland. It was a matter for him.

‘I was advised that there was no conflict of interest.

However, we are in real time here. I spoke to him, he’s taken a leave of absence from that. I will be appointing an interim director general in July and I think it is right and proper, in light of what has come out this week, that I need his absolute focus, for the last few short weeks that he has left, for him to be focused on Cervical Check and restoring confidence in it.

‘And he has a good history of working in screening programmes and he needs to work really hard at that over the next few weeks.’

Mr Harris says he is also in the dark about a confidentiality clause that Vicky Phelan was asked to sign but didn’t.

‘I don’t know where the confidentiality clause came from, whether it came from the State Claims side or whether it came from the laboratory, but what I definitely know is that if Vicki Phelan had signed a confidentiality agreement I would not know, as the Health Minister, and therefore the entire country would not know what has now emerged.

‘The idea that someone would have been gagged and would not have been able to tell their story, not just their own personal story but something that is of real importance to the people of Ireland in terms of their health service.

‘You know we often say, in Ireland, that someone has done the state some service, and it can often sound like a platitude, but in the case of Vicki Phelan it is an absolute statement of fact. ‘If she hadn’t had the courage to actually expose this I wouldn’t have had, in this very room, I wouldn’t have had a conversation with Cervical Check and others that actually brought about the fact there were potentially many other hundreds of other women who had their information withheld.

‘I think this has been a frightening week for many people in the country.’