Professor Fiona McNicholas:

I cannot understand why the number of psychiatry admissions to the paediatric units are not on record anywhere. I mentioned only one hospital but there are three in Dublin. Liaison psychiatry provision is not mentioned in the recent national mental health document. Child psychiatry services in paediatric hospitals are not funded by the mental health division but from the acute hospital budget. They are piggybacking on other services. If I was cynical I would say that perhaps they are best left hidden.

There is a broader picture about collecting data on mental health cases in general. My colleague alluded to the idea that if we do not have the right facts we are not going to be able to find the solutions. Numbers are counted in respect of how many go through but no effort is made to look at complexity, the clinical treatment offered or the outcome. My larger concern is that the difficulty in understanding what is done by CAMHS is mirrored by the committee's concern about GP practices and other infrastructure and the need to provide more resources for those. All of that definitely needs to happen but we are talking about community services including alcohol use, societal issues and housing problems, which are indicative of the primary interventions that are needed to optimise mental health and well-being in order that the small number who actually have psychiatric illness and who require very specialist services will actually get them. Our understanding was that today the committee's focus was to be on the issue at the top of the pyramid. We would, of course, like both to be resourced and consequently it is new and separate funding that should be considered by the Government.