Anne Rabbitte (Galway East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

While we offer accolades for all of the good words that have been uttered at this meeting, they were all committed to paper 13 years ago. As a member of the Joint Committee on the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, I am stickler for profiling people and conducting research. Page 15 of the document mentioned the need for multidisciplinary teams, to adopt a recovery perspective, to formalise links between specialised mental health services and for service users to be viewed as active participants. There is nothing new in this. In her opening comments Professor O'Connor said we should again consider an expert group or putting people into different positions, but the groundwork has been done. A Vision for Change was an excellent document, but how the HSE approached it might not have been best practice in the long run and it is coming home to roost.

I am my party's spokesperson on children. Professor O'Connor mentioned the numbers on waiting lists up to the end of July, but I have figures to the end of September when there were 2,333 children waiting for a referral for their first appointment, of whom 861 had been waiting for longer than three months. The list goes on, with 521 waiting for more than six months. What direct access do GPs have to make a referral? They need to know the baseline because nobody is in a better position than a GP to make that assessment and an early intervention. We all know what "acute" means and GPs are in the best position to identify it. It is when children need to be transferred immediately to CAMHS. Why are there roadblocks to prevent early intervention? That issue falls at the door of the HSE. How is it being addressed?