Ms Paula Leonard:

Perfect. Parentline received 211 calls in 2019 and 428 in 2020.

Alcohol-related brain injury refers to a group of conditions that arise due to changes in the structure and function of the brain resulting from the long-term consumption of alcohol. My colleague, Dr. Helen McMonagle, hopefully, will get to speak more about this later. The lack of provision for people with alcohol-related brain injuries became all too clear and was magnified during the Covid-19 pandemic. We have seen among high-risk dependent drinkers a significant shift in drinking patterns and a sharp shift towards home drinking. That resulted in alcohol intake rates far beyond what we had seen in this service in more than a decade of work. In the case of people with alcohol-related brain injuries currently being supported by family members, family members often become the full-time carers for people with such injuries as a way to avoid their loved ones living their lives out in nursing homes for older people. The caring role is significant and often involves intensive 24-hour a day support. The isolation those families experienced reached a tipping point during this period. In the case of people with alcohol-related bring injuries currently residing in inappropriate settings such a nursing homes, the impact of the pandemic on residents of nursing homes was devastating. As many as 70% of people with severe alcohol-related brain injuries will end up resident in a nursing home environment due to the lack specialised rehabilitative and assisted living services.

For these individuals, the Covid-19 pandemic compounded further the inappropriateness of these services for this young client group, with a lack of physical contact with their families and little or no stimulation beyond the confines of the nursing homes environment, which was a further assault on their desire for independence.

Today, I have focused narrowly on a small number of issues and challenges arising from the pandemic but I am going to use the remainder of my speaking time focusing on what we need to see happen. We in ICAAN and Alcohol Forum Ireland believe-----