Mary Butler (Waterford, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for the question and for her interest in mental health. I am aware that she has a profound interest in this area. It is not the first time the Deputy has asked questions relating to it.

The ADHD adult programme has received €1.3 million to date for three demonstration sites that are in the CHO 1 of Donegal, Sligo and Leitrim, CHO 3 of Limerick and CHO 6. The teams are not yet fully staffed. To date, as I said, the programme has received €1.3 million in funding. The HSE believes that €5 million in funding would allow for national coverage and 11 teams would be required to provide national coverage. A business plan for 2022 requesting €2.26 million has been submitted in the Estimates. The national clinical programme is working on developing an app to support patients, which will help provide support for regions with less coverage.

We are at a very early stage and admit that there is a lot of work and planning to do. We have been challenged with staff recruitment this year and there were special challenges with the cyberattack. There are five clinical programmes and I will be pushing extremely hard for these within the Estimates process. We have fantastic clinical programmes but if they are not funded multi-annually then we cannot deliver them. I give the Deputy a guarantee that I will be pushing hard on all of the clinical programmes. That is the update at the moment.