Recommendation IHRD-96: Healthcare Litigation Standards
From Report of the Inquiry into Hyponatraemia-related Deaths, published 31 January 2018.
Recommendation
The Department should provide clear standards to govern the management of healthcare litigation by Trusts and the work of Trust employees and legal advisors in this connection should be audited.
In brief (written by this site)
The Department of Health (Northern Ireland) stated in October 2022 that work to provide litigation standards remained in progress, explaining that the recommendation formed one of 20 actions overseen by its programme team where initial work had been completed by workstreams and sub-groups (Department of Health (Northern Ireland), Oct 2022). The department added in October 2022 that "further work is now required to ensure appropriate implementation at service level" (Department of Health (Northern Ireland), Oct 2022).
Sources
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 (Northern Ireland) says in progress (28 October 2022)
the 20 actions, to be overseen by the IHRD Programme Team, where initial work has been completed by the Workstreams and Sub-groups, but where further work is now required to ensure appropriate implementation at service level.
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 20 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 2A holds 20 actions.
Source
Responsible bodies
Themes and tags
Who has spoken
- Department of Health NI
Response - Department of Health (Northern Ireland)
Delivery statement