Dr. Cathal Morgan:

When I came to the post nearly 18 months ago and when Ms O'Neill came into the post midway through last year, we identified this as a key issue for us. Midway through last year our emphasis was on the reasons the service was not meeting its timelines. The detail I have given heretofore explains this. We put all of our energies into consultations with clinicians and staff on the ground through a consultation workshop. I am happy to accept that the professional bodies have remaining concerns, and if we were not sufficiently robust in our consultation process I am happy to take responsibility for that. The net point, however, will result in the standardised approach across the nine CHOs, which will require co-operation among clinicians on the ground working with assessment officers. This in itself will not be enough and I accept that there is a need for more therapy grades to be recruited. At the outset I made the point that even if we were given sanction for 400 new therapy posts covering speech and language therapists, occupational therapists, and psychologists and physiotherapists, it would take a number of years to recruit them. In the meantime, if those therapists walk into a system that has no structure to it, we will still end up with system with inequities in it, and there will be too much variance in practice. I must stress that this is not an attempt by us to constrain clinicians. The Chairman and I both come from a clinical background and we know it is a challenging process, including for the HSE. The Fórsa process is good. I accept that we probably should have gone into it much earlier but we made it known that we needed to move down this road. The current process we are in with Fórsa includes the main therapy grades and we are doing a line-by-line review. The specific issue of the 90-minute timeframe compared to a longer timeframe is open for discussion.