Dr. Caitríona Crowe:

Turning to Deputy Mitchell O'Connor, the Stillorgan-Blackrock pilot is a sister project of ours. There are four Genio projects around Ireland, including one in Kinsale and another in Mayo. We are all closely linked and collaborative, so we recognise the fantastic work that is being done in Stillorgan-Blackrock. It is also trying to be mainstreamed. I did not have time to mention the other pilots today, but I want to acknowledge their fantastic work.

Deputy Byrne's comments about her mother were moving. We recognise that anything we do as professionals is only a drop in the ocean compared with what families do. What they do - the love and loyalty that they show - humbles us all of the time. We support them in continuing to do what they want to do. Irish families and communities are extraordinary. We see it every day. It would move one to tears to see what people do for their loved ones, how much they love them and how much they want to look after them. I wanted to say this publicly.

The Deputy asked me what was different about our project. It is a collaborative project between us and the four voluntary bodies, all of the HSE staff that one might think of, the Alzheimer Society of Ireland, the Carers Association, Muintir na Tíre and the South Tipperary Community and Voluntary Forum, which is an umbrella group of the 70 voluntary bodies in south Tipperary. At the core of the project are three people with dementia and three carers. Some of these carers are former carers. We got a blank page from the HSE and were asked how to do it differently. The HSE gave us that money. It was an amazing opportunity to redesign factors. We looked a great deal to former carers who explained that something or other was not there when they were caring, for example. It is a different approach, in that it is bottom up rather than top down, and had never been seen before. This was a major strength. People with dementia and carers attended everything we did. They told us what to do next. In our memory technology library, former and current carers told us what would work, what not to use, etc. Much of the expert opinion that I give families on what to do next I learned from other carers. They found that something worked and they passed on the knowledge to someone else. The collaborative, bottom-up approach, the person with dementia and the family are at the centre of everything, making our project different.

We had freedom with our funding to change the project as we saw fit. We did not have to get permission to make a clinical nurse specialist post. If we recognised that it was needed, we did it. It was free and unrestricted. That has been a liberating experience. We have done amazing work with €700,000 and had the freedom to provide support to 340 people, as we did not need to submit business cases, write letters or explain matters. It is a great model for how the health service could be in many other domains.