It has been a torrid couple of weeks for Children’s Health Ireland, the organisation responsible for running Ireland’s children’s hospitals.

Recent scandals around children’s hip surgeries have followed previous reports of the use of unauthorised medical devices in spinal surgeries.

In light of these events, there have been questions about the quality of governance and the culture within the organisation.

There have also been further questions about controls in terms of the appropriateness of surgeries, and the use of the National Treatment Purchase Fund and whether or not it was appropriate.

Health Minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill joined The Anton Savage Show to discuss these issues, as well as an unpublished internal CHI report, which was recently referred to the Gardaí.

“This was an internal human resources-type report going into some very serious cultural issues,” she said.

“The people who participated in it – nurses, junior doctors and so on – they participated in it on that basis in a confidential way.

“The report does reflect some of the things that they say and some of them would be identifiable.”

Hospital ward, © PA Wire/PA Images

According to Minister MacNeill, CHI are reflecting on a way to publish the report “responsibly”.

“I do expect that to be published because the broader public interest very clearly requires it,” she said.

Minister MacNeill said she has “a lot of questions about hospital governance generally”.

“We spend a very significant amount of our taxpayer's money on health - quite appropriately - but we need to make sure that we’re getting the best value for that,” she said.

“Within that, we have quite a number of different hospital structures and governance structures.

“It’s probably not the best way of organising things for such a small country.”

According to Minister MacNeill, while CHI was brought in to create a more “cohesive” children’s system, “there’s very much more work to be done to integrate a single paediatric system”.

Main image: Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (L) and Anton Savage (R) in the Newstalk Studio.