Minister for Health Mary Harney has said there are no plans to change the structure of the Health Service Executive following the crisis in breast cancer diagnoses at Portlaoise hospital.
Ms Harney was speaking during a Dáil debate on three recent reports which identified systematic failures regarding the administration of cancer services at the Midlands Regional Hospital.
She said the reports had made clear that the errors which had led to nine women being misdiagnosed were errors by doctors and not management.
"It is a high priority for the [HSE] board to learn the lessons from the Fitzgerald report, not just in how they apply to Portlaoise, but in how they apply to governance, communications and management," she said. "The guarantee I give to patients is that if there is another serious incident, communication and management will be appropriate and it will be acted upon quickly."
But Fine Gael health spokesman James Reilly claimed last week's reports proved patients were not being put first in the health service and that the HSE management is anything but effective.
Dr Reilly also called for an inquiry into why Ms Harney knew nothing, until last week, about correspondence sent by consultant surgeon at Portlaoise Hospital Dr Peter Naughton to her predecessor Micheál Martin in which he expressed concerns about cancer services at the hospital.
"The Minister has lost trust. The HSE is a low trust organisation. There is a disconnection between those on the frontline those struggling to deliver efficient and reliable services and those who are part of a centralised and controlling bureaucracy," he said.
As part of today's debate the Government introduced a motion welcoming the publication of the reports and supporting the Minister for Health and the HSE in their attempts to ensure the interests of patients come first in the future.
But Labour's health spokeswoman Jan O'Sullivan said nothing in the Government motion gave her any confidence that a Portlaoise-type situation would not happen elsewhere in the health service.
"The motion pays lip-service to putting patients' interests first but says nothing about how the dysfunctional system will be changed to achieve that," she said.
Ms O'Sullivan said that when consultant Peter Naughton raised his concerns about an "unsafe situation" at Portlaoise, "nobody saw it as their job to ensure that his concerns were addressed".
She said Ms Harney must now recognise the seriousness of the underlying structural deficiencies in the HSE identified in the reports, and give a clear indication that she is willing to deal with them.
"It will take much more than action to 'strengthen the governance and management of serious incidents', as promised by the Minister, to fix with the underlying structural and management problems in the HSE."
