Dáil Éireann Debate, Tuesday - 12 December 2023
807. Deputy Noel Grealish asked the Minister for Health to provide a breakdown of claims made to the State Claims Agency related to the Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018, by categorisation of severity, from 1 January 2019 to date in 2023, in tabular form; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [54914/23]
View answerThe State Claims Agency (SCA) has a statutory remit to manage personal injury claims on behalf of Delegated State Authorities including the Health Service Executive. Accordingly, the SCA has provided me with the information set out below in response to the Deputy's question. I have been informed by the SCA that this information has been extracted from the National Incident Management System (NIMS) according to the criteria and definitions set out below.
SCA Response:
The SCA has two ongoing claims from persons alleging that their unborn baby was wrongfully diagnosed with a condition sufficient to bring them within the scope of the Health Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy Act 2018. It is inappropriate to provide the years of claims, as to do so could have the effect of identifying individual cases.
Notes: The information contained within this report has been extracted from the National Incident Management System (NIMS) as per the below criteria.
There is no specific field for these claims on NIMS. Therefore, a key word search was completed on relevant text fields on NIMS of potentially relevant claims reported in the relevant period. Following this, a manual review was completed to identify relevant claims.
Criteria used:• All Healthcare locations on NIMS• Who was involved = Patient/ Service User.• Claims have been identified by searching in the free text fields “Summary of the Incident”, “Type of Injury (Other)” or “Sub hazard type (text)” for the words “TOP” (termination of pregnancy), “STOP” (surgical termination of pregnancy), “MTOP” (medical termination of pregnancy), “Termination”, “Medical termination”, “Abortion”.• A manual review was carried out on the resulting list of claims by the relevant SCA unit to determine relevance to the query.• This report is correct as of 06/12/2023.
Definitions: National Incident Management System (NIMS)National Incident Management System (NIMS): Incidents (which include claims) are reported using the “National Incident Management System”, hosted by the State Claims Agency (SCA). An incident can be a harmful Incident (Adverse Event), no harm incident, near miss, dangerous occurrence (reportable circumstance) or complaint. NIMS is the system used by the delegated authorities to fulfil their statutory requirement to report incidents to the State Claims Agency and for their own incident and risk management purposes.
Who Was Involved: Field detailing the type of person involved, e.g. Staff Member, Member of the Public, etc. This is the Highest level of person category on NIMS, as displayed in the three levels below.
Sub Hazard Type: Based on the’ Incident/Hazard Category’, this grouping provides a further breakdown of hazard types. This allows for a more detailed categorisation of the incidents recorded. For example, under the ‘Clinical Care’ hazard category, the sub-hazards include ‘Labour/Delivery’, ‘Diagnosis’,‘Surgical/Medical Procedures’, etc. Similarly, under ‘Exposure to Physical Hazards’, the sub-hazards include ‘Slips/Trips/Falls’, ‘Fire’, ‘Ergonomics (include manual/people handling)’, ‘Temperature (excluding Fire)’, ‘Radiation’, ‘Non-Mechanical (including Person/Animal)’, ‘Noise’, ‘Vibration’, and ‘Electrical & Mechanical components’.
Sub Hazard Type (text): A subcategory of "Sub Hazard Type" this allows the user the opportunity to specify the hazard.
Type of Injury Other: A field which records sub categorisation of "Type of Injury". Cites if there are any additional injury suffered by the injured party, e.g. fracture could be cited as the 'Type of Injury', and 'Cut/Laceration', could be added to the 'Other'.
Summary of the Incident: A free text field whereby a description of the incident can be entered by the DSA. It is important that the information provided is factual based on the actual incident that occurred.
