Dr. Caitríona Crowe:

The project has been run through my old age psychiatry team for three years. It is not that these people were psychiatric patients. It was that I was the lead. It was meant to ensure good governance and accountability and to keep it safe. As we proceed, there will be no need for all of the patients to be under old age psychiatry. It is making them psychiatric patients unnecessarily. A part of our sustainability plan is to move them into community care, with the consultants having an overarching involvement and there being more of a memory team running it alongside HSE management. We are working on the location and setting. Our sustainability plan is for them not to be in mental health services, as they do not need to be there, and that they would access mental health services from our clinic and mental health specialists when they need it. Most people do not have psychiatric complications in dementia, but approximately one third of them do. People will be located in community care with the proper governance and supervisory structure around it.

Regarding Deputy Ó Caoláin's second question, which was on dementia support workers, they are an interesting grade. We have developed it and their role. It is based on peer support workers. Members might have heard of them. They crop up in many settings. For example, they are being developed in mental health services. We recruit them from the Alzheimer Society of Ireland and the Carers Association. We work closely with both groups. This is a collaborative project. We have recruited people who are trained to FETAC level 5, which is a nationally recognised qualification. We reinterviewed them for the project and checked their suitability. We had a high threshold. If I was happy to see them in my mother's kitchen, I would have them in the project. They had to be special, warm and giving.

We have fantastic people. There are 19 of them. We give them further training. We developed a two-day intensive dementia programme. We also give them monitoring and mentoring. We are very fussy about the quality of person whom we have. We brought them all in last week and they told us how much they loved doing this work. It is new work in Ireland. It is different than being a home helper. Some are home helpers and some are doing other jobs. Ours is a new model that can be expanded everywhere.

Deputy Ó Caoláin's third question was on the population. In south Tipperary, there are approximately 1,000 people with dementia. In or around one third of those are in long-term care, leaving 650 or so in the community. Our budget of €700,000 has allowed us to provide support to approximately 340 of these over three years. That is the cost of four or five people in long-term care in the same period. The cost effectiveness is staggering. I hope that I have answered the Deputy's questions.