Mr. Tom McLoughlin:

I wish to make a few comments on services and the directories etc. in the hope that someone can intervene with the Department. Different agencies have vastly different availability of psychiatric, speech and language, occupational therapy and psychology services. There is no crossover between those services. Typically, those professional services can only work for a specific agency and within a rigid system, it is a further layer of rigidity that is causing excessive delays. From our own perspective, we had a positive experience in the psychiatric area. One of the agencies our older son is with brought in an eminent psychiatrist neurosurgeon from the UK. This neurosurgeon paid for his time multiple times over because of the vast improvement in services. Can that be replicated in other agencies? Not on your life. Equally, we now go to that neurosurgeon in the UK. We look at our own private health insurance and this is where you are dealing with multiple layers of difficulty and inflexibility.

You cannot get psychiatric services abroad when it comes to private medical insurance. Another thing to highlight is that there has to be something wrong with the system, with predominantly females working in the clinical area and in the whole carer area. I think this is a factor in staff turnover, with maternity leave etc. You have to ask why many staff do not want to come back into the services. I would not say it requires just a tweak, because it would make a huge difference if we better used and more efficiently used the range of services available to us.