Mr. James Kelly:

One thing we were very cognisant of was Sharing the Vision which is the national mental health policy. It is aligned with Sláintecare in that it is about providing the right care in the right environment at the right time and moving as much as possible towards community-based care and supporting people with mental health difficulties to live independent lives.

There is also an understanding that there will always be a need to provide for involuntary detention and inpatient treatment. Sharing the Vision is a ten-year strategy. Over the lifetime of that strategy, this updated Bill will become an Act and will be commenced so hopefully they will complement each other as we move towards empowering people's access to services in the community. That can be seen in section 9, which is about making an application for involuntary detention. In line with the expert group recommendations we have limited the group of people who can make an application to authorised officers, which are already a prescribed grade within the HSE. The idea is that the authorised officer would have a more holistic view of the person, such as where he or she lives and what supports are available to that person in the community. If the officer believes that none of those supports are adequate or that the person needs more acute care, he or she could make the application. At every stage before the person is brought to the approved centre, consideration will be given to what other supports are available to him or her, and if there is family support, consideration will be given to what is available there and what the capacity is. Involuntary detention would really only happen as a last resort and we have explicitly said that in section 9. When a person is resident in an approved centre, he or she should be there for as short a time as possible. When that person's condition starts to improve to the extent that he or she can be discharged then he or she should be and there should be discharge planning around where the person is going, whether her or she is going back to his or her family and that kind of thing. It is baked into the general scheme.