Ms Orla Barry:

In response to the question about the impact of staffing shortages on mental health services, the mental health services are about the relationships between staff and the people who use the services, families and carers. We see within hospital and community services that staff are under stress because there is huge pressure to deliver the service with reduced staff numbers. This is particularly evident in the liaison with schools and home visit supports to families. We hear from people that the support they would have had in the past from their community mental health teams is not being provided in the way that it should. The need to staff hospitals and develop community mental health teams at the same time is critical to the quality of mental health services.

The concern we hear from people about rent supplement is that many people with mental health difficulties are on very low incomes and having on top of this concerns about how one is going to pay rent and whether one will have the same landlord in a month’s time is causing huge distress. The message that has come through to us is, "Please put that forward". Utility bills are going up. Trying to maintain a very basic standard of living and keep one’s home is doubly difficult for someone with a mental health difficulty. There is no housing tenancy sustainment stream for people with a mental health difficulty to provide the support required to help people to maintain their homes. This gap has emerged in the national housing strategy for people with a disability and the Departments of Health and the Environment, Community and Local Government need to examine this.