Ms Samantha Kenny:

On county borders, I do not think people realise how much they impact on everything, including on funding and therapists. We live in south Kildare and in our case my daughter attends school in Carlow. The special needs preschools are not funded under the early childhood care and education model but by the HSE directly, and the HSE looks at county boundaries for funding.

We had to get a special allowance to go to a preschool ten minutes away rather than, for easiness and lack of bureaucracy, to a preschool 30 minutes away in the opposite direction, which would also be in the direction I take with my other children. If she takes sick, I have zero way of doing basic tasks such as collecting my other children from school and trying to collect her from preschool at the same time. That is why we opted for one ten minutes down the road. I had to go to the media to get funding for a preschool ten minutes across the boundary because there was so much bureaucracy and people were not signing paperwork. I literally had to go to the media to get funding for a preschool.

County boundaries also affect the therapists. Because my daughter lives in County Kildare and attends a school in County Carlow, any therapy work she needs doing in school has to be done by the Kildare therapists. Even though a visit might be happening in school by Carlow-based therapists, they cannot do anything with my child and I have to arrange an appointment from her therapy team in Kildare. This new model, which is removing therapists from school, is now going to happen nationwide. Therapists are being removed from schools. Her school does not have a therapist and only has nurses. Every time she needs a seat adjustment or a stander adjustment, which might only take 20 minutes, her therapist has to travel more than 40 minutes to do a 20-minute seat adjustment because no local therapist can do it and there are no therapists in the school anymore.

County boundaries are not just about funding. Imagine how much money we could save if we did not have therapists travelling for an hour at a time to do one single 20-minute visit and if we had a team of therapists who just went around the schools in the locality. They could take care of basic care, such as making sure standers were adjusted correctly or making sure the chairs the kids were using were okay. If there were issues in the school, they could ensure an OT session was put in place so a schedule could be changed. Instead, we have therapists travelling from 40 minutes to an hour to see one child for 20 minutes. That is the bureaucracy we are facing. It is ridiculous.

Even this 30 km radius would not work for my child because my therapist centre is 40 km away from her school. This needs looking at on a deeper level because the county boundary model is not working; it really is not working. Again, we are going to have kids waiting for seat and stander adjustments because therapists have to factor in 40 minutes of journey time to go and to do this one thing or to try to make sure that all the kids they have in the one school are in school on the exact day they happen to visit, which, as we know, cannot be done because if the child is sick, the child is sick. It is just not working. In my opinion, if we even had a local team of therapists who just did school visits, that would take a massive amount of work off therapists and they would be freed up to provide more care for people in an in-depth, more personal manner. If this happened, we would have kids not just accessing appointments for equipment assessments. They would be able to access therapists when parents are having issues or if the child is having issues, and they could have one-on-one sessions because we would not lose therapists who have to go and visit a school an hour away. If we had a therapist for the school side and therapists who did the day-to-day stuff, that would make a massive difference.