Alliance Health Spokesperson Paula Bradshaw has warned that serious questions remain on what is being learned from the Neurology Recall, after a Ministerial Statement on the second cohort of cases reviewed.

The South Belfast MLA stated: “The Minister was right to emphasise that although this is predominantly a statistical exercise, it focuses on real lives seriously impacted by failings in Health and Social Care which should never have happened. The distress caused by these failings to hundreds of people, and to their families, is incalculable.

“The frustration now, however, is that although the focus is on reviewing cases linked to one man, we are hearing very little about redress and about what learning we are taking from this sorry episode.

“The Epidural Blood Patch Review, where a huge majority of patients were wrongly treated, suggests failings which were broader and more systemic than those relating to one consultant. Work on redress and on other reviews has been delayed, and not always because of the pandemic, meaning we still have a limited understanding of what happened, what went wrong, and why.

“Serious questions therefore remain about what learning we are taking from this, about what we are actually changing, and about how we can be assured the same thing is not happening now and will not happen again.

“We need more urgency is terms of what we are going to do to compensate the victims of these failings, and what reforms we will be making to restore public confidence.”