Ms Patricia Bourke:

Looking globally to put it together, we need to adopt a whole of health model. We tend to adopt a medical model where we look at someone with an ailment such as diabetes and often do not look at the holistic aspects of his or her health. I agree we need good Government policies. We have a lot of good Government policies but there is a need to look at local needs. There are good pockets of best practice out there but they are not consistent across the country. There is a need to look at what is working well to see can that be expanded out to other places. Rather than reinventing the wheel, we need to be doing that.

In regard to peer support, a lot of the peer support initiatives are funded on a project-by-project basis which in the long term is not the best. It needs to have a funding stream. Not only is it empowering those who are suffering with mental health difficulties, but it is becoming a whole of community approach. We need to be embracing a whole of population approach. We tend to focus on the elderly, the youth, etc. What we are talking about here is the whole of community. There is quite a lot of research. We are talking about families struggling because either older people are disconnected from them or are, as shown in The Irish LongituDinal Study on Ageing, TILDA, from Trinity College, with failing health, having to provide the child care because couples or single parents cannot afford the child care costs. There is a need to look at the child care costs and whether families can be supported to become families again. Whether it is LGBT families or whatever, families have changed and we have got to open our thinking.

I take on board the point about stigma. Ireland is not fully out of the stigma category, even with the huge amount of work on mental health with the Little Things campaign and our own Five Ways to Well-being, which is based on the NEF report. Members all will have seen the media coverage of the recent statistics on the Little Things campaign. In 2015, 81% of people still saw stigma when it comes to mental health - they will still have a problem with that - 35% found it difficult to talk to someone even at this stage and 55% stated that they would not want people to know if they themselves experienced a mental health problem. That relates to mental health where it is talked about a lot. I can totally empathise. We have not yet fully opened our minds in Ireland and we need to move towards that.

The inter-generational piece needs to be looked at. We have to accept it is not a case of one size fits all. I have worked in different sectors and I have come across young 90 year olds and old 50 year olds. It is not a case that one size fits all.

On the transport issue, I agree that we need to be looking elsewhere outside of Ireland as well. In London, for instance, they call it Dial-a-Ride. They telephone when they want to go to an appointment and they have a set-up with a local taxi service. Maybe we need to be looking at other ways of looking at local resources. While I do not have all the answers, there have to be other ways of doing it.

Going back to the peer support networks, historically, community development used fund a lot of that. There needs to be clear funding around that. Whether through the local authority, the community, the Department of Social Protection, DSP, or wherever, it needs to be looked at.

On the care teams, this is about lack of consistency. Some HSE areas are up to full complement; others are not. The HSE is trying to source staff. I recognise that the HSE is encountering difficulties in trying to source staff. It is not from a lack of trying. However, that is not easy for those on the ground who do not have the services.