Mary Butler (Waterford, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Senator Dolan is another wonderful advocate for mental health. I have spoken to her so many times on this. I am joined by my key people in the mental health unit in the Department of Health. I am surrounded by people who support me every day of the week and I thank them for all the work they do. The Senator will be able to raise the recruitment with the HSE next week and I hope she does. In my budget last year, I received the funding for 153 whole-time equivalents. Some 40 have been recruited. All year long, every two months I met with the key people in the HSE to see how that recruitment is progressing. As I said, recruitment to the clinical programmes has gone very well and we hope to have almost all in posts by the end of the year.

Recruitment for the HSE is outsourced to the national recruitment service. It does not deal with it specifically. It should be able to answer many questions for the Senator. We are putting a greater focus on local recruitment campaigns which are targeted at local posts. With regard to - I am crossing over - healthcare workers to support people with homecare, if we find areas in which these are specifically targeted, we put in localised recruitment posts to see if we can get key people at the right time, which is hugely important. It is a challenge. It was the same last year. It will be the same this year. Most of the staff come into posts by the end of the year but the most important thing for me is that we get them into posts. The Senator will be able to tease that out more.

With regard to CAMHS, a huge emphasis was put on recruitment over the past four years. Some 114 new assistant psychologists and 20 psychologists were recruited to HSE primary care since 2018. We also have increased undergraduate psychiatric nurse places by 130 overall per year, including for CAMHS. I have spoken about this with the Minister, Deputy Harris, on several occasions regarding dieticians. It is so important we have the joined-up thinking about what we need in the third level sector. If we have challenges around dieticians, psychologists or mental health nurses, it takes a few years for them to come on stream. At the same time, the most important thing is we are aware of it and we are trying to sort it out.

Senator Dolan asked me about the acute settings. I have to compliment the departments of psychiatry, DOPs, throughout the country. They were able to maintain supports for people with very ill mental health, up to 90% during the pandemic.

They also coped very well with challenges relating to some premises. We have 66 departments of psychiatry throughout the country and 52 of them are fairly new builds. We are still working on this and while we have challenges, I was delighted to announce under our capital plan a new 50-bed unit for Waterford and another 50-bed unit for St. Luke's in Kilkenny. A unit is coming to Waterford not just because I am living there but because we have had capacity issues for many years. In 2012 the department of psychiatry in Wexford was closed and all supports moved to Waterford but the capacity was not increased. We had a service-level agreement with St. Patrick's in Dublin but to be honest, we were really challenged and the new unit is great news. When we make these announcements it is fantastic but we want to see them up and running as quickly as possible. While it can take three to four years for that to happen, it is a positive move forward.

I will be meeting the executive clinical directors who run the departments of psychiatry throughout the country later this week. I have a lot of meetings in my diary. I meet the directors every quarter and they raise with me any challenges they have. Obviously they raise issues relating to bed capacity. The Senator may have missed what I said earlier about the bed capacity review which will determine the challenges we have.

The Senator asked about liaison with An Garda Síochána. A number of issues relating to the Garda will be addressed through the new task force on criminal justice. Mr. Dodd spoke earlier about the fact that there is a new task force in place. We are working very closely with the Department of Justice. Ms Kathleen Lynch has been appointed as an independent chairperson. Training is available for gardaí because it is hugely important that they can recognise when a person has mental health issues. This is an issue I have looked at closely and I recommend training for people so that they can recognise that people have dementia, for example, and can see the signs. I hope I have covered all of the issues raised.