Mr. Paul Gilligan:

First and foremost, I will comment on the point on health care assistants. It is important for us that our multidisciplinary teams are considered to include everyone who works in our organisation, including household staff, porters and catering staff. All play a key part in creating a recovery ethos. The health care assistant development has been important for us. We envisage that in future this will be even more important.

Naturally, there are delicacies around introducing a new role. It has been particularly successful for us and we see it having a strong future. The way to develop it appropriately will stem from discussions with the other professions to enable us to maintain the multidisciplinary team approach.

Earlier, a question was asked about funding models. We are strongly of the view that a bundled care model is the only way forward. The difficulty is that the separation of services is reflected often in the separation of the types of experience to which a person is subject. Parts of a person's care transfers from one person to another. It would take years to resolve this unless we follow the money. When a bundled care approach is introduced, the system is informed that for a given amount of money a given patient needs to be treated from illness to recovery. The way the components of care are provided is down to the service provider.

This model is the only way that we will be able to develop an integrated service model and to ensure real outcomes for people. At the moment, the itemised service delivery is not working. It creates real difficulties.

The issue of stigma is important. We have taken two steps forward and one step back. There is far more awareness around mental health at the moment in Ireland. Certainly, there is more acceptance but there are deeply ingrained beliefs and misunderstandings around mental health that will take a long time to resolve. It all comes back to the issue of education. Indeed, education and prevention are key in the area of alcohol usage and mental health. Most young people begin using alcohol because of social pressure, anxiety or depression. That is the reality. We need to educate and help our young people to understand the dangers. Moreover, we need to educate them around their emotional awareness and how they learn to understand their emotions and deal with them. Such an approach would have an impact on their alcohol and drug usage.