Professor Malcolm MacLachlan:

I thank Deputy Cairns for her question. We all share the frustration expressed by her constituents. It is one of the reasons we have been motivated to develop a completely different approach to providing services to children with disabilities. As she knows, the basis on which people previously accessed services was often to do with the area they lived in, what school they attended, how rich they were or the nature of their disability. The design of the CDNTs is supposed to create a situation where there is equal opportunity of access.

I suggest that the PDS approach is working. For instance, in considering the preliminary team analysis, which is being incorporated as part of the assessment of needs procedure, an intervention is immediately recommended for 86% of the children assessed through that process. To give the Deputy an idea, prior to the introduction of that standard operating procedure, people were sometimes waiting for four or five years for an assessment and there was a subsequent waiting list for the intervention.

We certainly acknowledge that the teams are not yet fully resourced. The Minister of State has been very successful in getting funding to support the resourcing of those teams. There is also a pipeline issue. We need more therapists across a whole range of different specialties. Unfortunately, it is not a matter of us being able to immediately resource all teams fully. We need to identify the pipeline of producing and educating people and not merely in the traditional approaches that have been taken.

The CDNTs are very much focused on the ethos of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, CRPD, which emphasises interdisciplinary working and moving away from a sort of deficit medical model and so on. That also requires a change in work practices among the various clinicians. We share the Deputy's frustration but we are committed to the idea that this is the right way forward. It is certainly compliant with the CRPD and I submit that it is already showing very encouraging results.