Mr. Jim Ryan:

I will be brief. In regard to 24-7 services, we started with 7-7 because we wanted to do service provision in a way which would allow us to see to where the evidence would point. Earlier this year, we did a trawl of the 114 general adult community mental health teams and we found that 60% of them were providing a seven day a week service, which meant we had a 40% gap. We then identified that to meet that gap we needed an additional 50 whole-time equivalents. We sought funding from the programme for Government, which we received. We then consulted with local areas on what professionals would be required.

We have that information and we are recruiting those 50 posts to be in place by the end of quarter one in 2018.

There have been questions on the roadmap. That is what it means. We expect to get that information because we will have a suite of key performance indicators to see what value it has brought to a Saturday and a Sunday service. Has it reduced people having to attend emergency departments? Has it reduced people having to go back into hospital? We want to trial the evidence before we look at moving on to a 24-7 basis. At the moment, we do not have a model of care which we could stand over. There is a lot of information here. Briefly, that is the situation in regard to the development, on what we would see as a phased basis.

The second item that we raised was around forensics in the Department of Justice and Equality. In the Central Mental Hospital we have 12 forensic psychiatry-led teams. Most of those are operating in prisons. In all the Dublin and Leinster prisons we have a forensic psychiatrist, social worker and nurse who are working within the prison system. They are treating prisoners who have a mental illness and, who at that time, either do not have to come into the Central Mental Hospital or who are on a waiting list to come in. It is an attempt to try and provide care where the prisoner is located if we cannot get them into Dundrum. The 93 beds tend to be full all of the time and there is a waiting list.

Those teams operate on a year-round basis. We are also expanding that to Castlerea. There is a limited service in both Cork and Limerick and we are trying to enhance that as we speak. We have both the posts and the funding for it. It is a question of making sure that it integrates with local services.