Dr. Joanne McCarthy:

I apologise. Disability in the pandemic was not going to be resolved by health alone. The really good thing about the vulnerable subcommittee is that the community Covid response was also sitting and reporting in to that committee. Many people with disabilities and their families were really dependent on the local responses that were happening on an ad hoc basis through the community response. Within disability and within the HSE we committed to responding and putting in place as best we could an initial emergency response to the pandemic. Any issues that we as a sector felt we could not get resolved we had the capacity to escalate to NPHET. Having fewer than 16 people with disabilities in residential services pass away as a result of Covid - which was still 16 too many - does speak volumes when one looks at the difference between what happened with us and within nursing homes. It was partially because we had that link.

There are some outstanding issues, the decisions around the wearing of face masks is definitely a problem for the deaf and hard of hearing. That is an ongoing issue that we have with NPHET. Several members of the committee have raised the issue today of how to continue to support medically vulnerable people who are cocooning and that is another issue we have with NPHET. We are still waiting for them to give clearer guidance to our sector on those two outstanding issues.