Following the commencement of the Patient Safety (Notifiable Incidents and Open Disclosure) Act 2023, we monitor compliance against the National Standards for Safer Better Healthcare in healthcare services provided or funded by the Health Service Executive (HSE) and private hospitals. Furthermore, we regulate medical exposures to ionising radiation by both public and private providers.

We monitor services against national standards and publish our inspection, review and investigation reports on our website. National standards describe what patients and people using services should expect when they experience a healthcare service.

We also publish guidance documents for each of our monitoring programmes, which describe the methodology involved and how we conduct this work, and what the desired outcomes will be.

We can also investigate or carry out a service review into the safety, quality and standards of healthcare services if we believe there is a serious risk to the health and welfare of people using healthcare services.