Recommendation IHRD-33: CEO Responsibility for Investigations
From Report of the Inquiry into Hyponatraemia-related Deaths, published 31 January 2018.
Recommendation
Compliance with investigation procedures should be the personal responsibility of the Trust Chief Executive.
In brief (written by this site)
In June 2026, the Minister of Health, Mike Nesbitt, stated that this recommendation was "under active consideration" as part of the Department of Health's programme to redesign the SAI procedure, with further detail to follow once he agreed final strategic proposals (Mike Nesbitt, Jun 2026). The department had previously reported in October 2022 that initial work had been completed and responsibility was transferred to an internal policy area (Department of Health (Northern Ireland), Oct 2022).
AI-generated summary of the record on this page, checked by a second model and automatic checks, 26 Sep 2026. The record below is the sources' own words.
Government response
My Department accepts the recommendations of the O'Hara Report in their entirety.
Blanket government agreement does not establish acceptance or delivery by each addressee. Some response passages cover groups of recommendations.
Scope of the government response
The Minister of Health accepted all 96 recommendations together, in one sentence of a written statement to the Northern Ireland Assembly on 25 March 2021. That sentence is not a response to any one recommendation alone, and the Department of Health published no response to each recommendation. The Department's statements of 31 January, 2 February and 30 March 2018 contain no acceptance of the recommendations.
Delivery
Department of Health NI states no delivery position (20 June 2026)
The remaining 21 IHRD recommendations which relate to SAIs are under active consideration as part of the Department’s ongoing programme to redesign the extant SAI Procedure. These recommendations are set out in Table 2 below. Further detail on the extent to which each of these remaining IHRD recommendations will be addressed through the SAI Redesign Programme will be available once I have considered and agreed the final strategic proposals.
From: AQW 45206/22-27 (Northern Ireland Assembly written question: IHRD recommendations that reference Serious Adverse Incidents), Mike Nesbitt, Minister of Health (Northern Ireland)
Site note: The Minister's written answer gives this passage once, for the 21 recommendations (counting the parts of recommendation 37 separately) it lists in its Table 2, and this recommendation is one of them. It gives no position on any one of them.
Department of Health (Northern Ireland) says in progress (28 October 2022)
the 37 actions, where initial work has been completed, but where it is now appropriate to transfer responsibility for these recommendations from the IHRD implementation programme to the appropriate DoH policy area.
Site note: These words are from the Department of Health's document linked on this page. The Department's website asks automated tools not to fetch its document files directly, so the site cites the page that links the document.
Site note: The Department's October 2022 statement gives this passage once, for a group of 37 actions, and does not list the recommendations in the group. The site places this recommendation in it from the Department's per-action list of the same date, where Phase 2B holds 37 actions.
Source
Responsible bodies
Themes and tags
Who has spoken
- Department of Health NI
Response, delivery statement - Department of Health (Northern Ireland)
Delivery statement