HIQA’s promotes safety and quality in healthcare services in Ireland. To do this, we inspect hospitals and other healthcare providers and talk to patients, staff and managers to determine if healthcare providers are meeting national standards. 

We monitor healthcare services provided or funded by the Health Service Executive (HSE). Furthermore, we regulate medical exposures to ionising radiation by both public and private providers. Apart from medical exposure to ionising radiation, we do not currently have a legal remit to regulate or monitor providers of private healthcare services. 

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.