Patrick Costello (Dublin South Central, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I want to make one or two follow-up points on workforce planning and pick up on some of the other things that were said. If it is easier to provide a written answer to my questions, that will suffice.

The point was made that Tusla's target was based on the affordable workforce, not necessarily a needs assessment. Has a needs assessment been done? What sort of modelling is Tusla looking at? There was talk of multidisciplinary teams. Do the multidisciplinary teams and the nature of that make it into the needs assessment? For example, if there are no access workers, it is possible that social workers could be looking at transport to and from access and supervising access eating a huge proportion of their time, which impacts on their ability to run other cases and all sorts of other things. I am asking about that balance of the multidisciplinary teams, access workers, social care workers and therapeutic staff as part of that needs assessment. The witnesses can give me a written answer on the workforce planning.

I refer to the family court Bill and the new family court building. The Child and Family Agency will be a significant user of both and I trust that there has been adequate consultation with the Child and Family Agency from the Courts Service and the Department of Justice on both. If there has not been, Tusla can put that in writing to us and we can follow it up.