Mary Butler (Waterford, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for his question. The team around me here will know that I have been talking about eating disorders for the past 14 months because, as Deputy Kenny, rightly said, it has manifested, especially last year and this year, in the context of the pandemic. I am open to correction but I think close to 487 young people were admitted last year with an eating disorder, especially young teenagers, so this is a very worrying trend. The national clinical programme for eating disorders was launched in 2018, but unfortunately in 2019 and 2020 the funding was not available. I reinstated the funding this year, so €3.94 million has been reinstated. When I came into post we had three eating disorder teams. The national clinical programme set out in 2018 wanted a total of 16 teams to cover the whole country. When I came into post we had three teams which were not fully populated. This year, as a result of the funding of €3.94 million, we will have three fully populated teams, and we will have three new teams in place by the end of this year. I am already looking at next year in regard to the budget Estimate, and I want to see a further three teams next year. We will come back to recruitment as it can be quite challenging to get the people into place.

People will really benefit from community-based eating disorder teams. People can recover from an eating disorder and that is one of the things I would like to say today.

As I said, funding has been made available this year to progress the recruitment of an additional CAMHS-based eating disorder team in CHO 2, and the creation of two new adult eating disorder hubs in CHO 4 and 9. By the end of this year we will have three adult teams and three CAMHS teams in place. As I said, I had a meeting last week in regard to next year's Estimates.

The most important thing for the success of a clinical programme is to build on it every year and ensure there is continual roll out. We have challenges, in that there are many disciplines within an eating disorder team, such as dietitians, occupational therapists and so on. This is a positive story, but at the same time I am concerned about the number of people presenting with eating disorders.

The national clinical programme is being led very well at the moment. It has the support of Bodywhys, an NGO known to many people which also supports people with eating disorders.