Ms Vickie Kirkpatrick:

I do not have numbers but Ms Kenny does. This has been looked at in terms of procurement but the Deputy would have to ask the HSE. I am not sure about areas with regard to managing the assessment of need numbers. From a practical point of view, without real planning we will just create a bubble elsewhere in the system. Telling people they have a disability without the dynamic assessment we spoke about earlier and without planning for intervention means they will just sit somewhere else, so to speak, and then we will run the risk of privatisation of interventions. The way it might differ from the medical model is that someone going for hip or heart surgery will get better but people with a disability may have a lifelong condition and they might need to dip in and out. A system that, from the get-go, can give people strategies because the structure contains a one-point access would be simpler.

A Band-Aid solution would be very short-sighted in terms of supporting families for an assessment. We are more than our assessments in terms of what we offer families.