Kathleen Lynch (Cork North Central, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Yes. There will also be a new children’s unit for forensic stabilisation. We send many children abroad, as the committee knows, and we hope to ensure these people will come back. That is also the intention for the intensive care units that we will build around the country so that people who have mental health difficulties and need that forensic input will not have to be so remote from their families. We will bring them back to their communities.

In doing that we have to ensure we have the right subset for the posts. When I meet the people who lead the service, they say they advertise through the national panel and people apply and get the posts. If, however, a person gets a position that is vacant in Monaghan and the one he or she originally wanted, maybe in Cork, becomes available, that person has the right to move to that post. Therefore, one is constantly trying to backfill the posts. This is even more acute in the forensic service because the person has to go through an intensive training process and if, after doing that, the post he or she originally wanted comes up, the person moves out. We are considering how we can best apply local specialised panels to ensure we get the right people in the right place.

We have a difficulty in respect of psychology, as everyone knows. We are not training enough psychologists and some of those we do train go abroad to get wider expertise, which is good because they will bring it back with them. That is why we are seriously considering the prospect of retraining highly skilled nurses and social workers in the service in cognitive behavioural therapy, CBT, which has very good outcomes for mental health.

I hope the committee members have received the table showing the posts that have been recruited and will be filled this year. There are 196 for this year. This is a response to question No. 34 from Senator Marc MacSharry. The table shows that we are putting people in place for old age psychiatry, which we had not done for the past few years, and for people with intellectual disability, which is also a highly specialised area. It is a question of finding the gaps and determining how to fill them. Up to now we had been paying particular attention to child and adolescent and adult psychiatry.

The strategy A Vision for Change refers to the establishment of 99 multidisciplinary child and adolescent mental health services, CAMHS, teams providing community-hospital liaison and day hospital services. A total of 69 teams are in place: 62 community services, three adolescent day services and three hospital liaison health teams. This is very important for liaising with families.