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commitments put forward that to say very detailed recommendations
for a change but we also said that the health service had to produced
action plans saying how they would they change things. They had to
introduced new complaint forms, put a new complaint system in place
and after a year we have said that we will re-inspect to make sure
that the implementation plans that they agreed to have actually being
delivered on and sometimes as well you make recommendations and
people implement the recommendations and it still doesn’t achieve
the desired results. We’ve been looking not just to see is people have
done what we asked them to do but whether it’s worked or not. And if
it hasn’t we would be asking them to change it. So, I think it has brought
about a big change in the whole culture of dealing with complaints.
We now have properly identified complaints offices for every hospital
in Ireland. Previously it was something somebody did as part of their
other duties. We have forms and posters and leaflets on displays, we
have standard text that they use in websites to tell people that they
have a right to come to my office. So, it was an interesting exercise.
I just want to make one other point, ex officio investigations can be
very, if you go into them in that way they use a lot of the resources
of your office. In my office, it is no different to anyone else’s. We do
not have extra resources. So, we have to be very careful in choosing
the topics for ex officio investigations. And what we’ve been looking at
is people who because of their circumstances are very dependent on
public services and might find it very difficult to complain. So, we are
looking for instance at services for people with intellectual disparities
and services for homeless people as two of the areas in which we will
next conduct ex officio investigations because we had to think long
and hard about how can we have the most impact. And how can we
actually use the power in a way that gets us into places that complaints
aren’t taking us. Thank you.

CHAIR: Thank you Peter. Let me just, give me one second please, and
highlight two points here. He talked about a change in culture, administrative
culture. And we specifically talked about what essentially is an important
aspect of an ombudsman job was how to promote best practice. And the
best practice here was in fact to review what the administrations doing,
recommend a change in policy and then say, “I’ll come back and check it
again” which is exercising its best practice and also exercising control in an

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