Holly Cairns (Cork South West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State. I really appreciate her offer and I look forward to the meeting. I welcome that the HSE is considering having that kind of honest conversation with families, rather than allowing them to be consistently fobbed off by the system when there are not sufficient numbers of staff in place, as is currently the case, and we are looking at next year. In the context of the allocation of staff, I wish to highlight that an area of which I am aware and which has a big population has an allocation for the CDNT of the equivalent of 0.5 nurses. We need to be more ambitious in terms of staffing allocations if our hope is that this issue will be rectified next year, when, as Ms Crehan-Roche stated, all the staff will be embedded and bedded down and all that stuff. I do not see how half a nurse will be sufficient for a network team to service an area. All of these promises have been made to have all the staff and everything set up next year, but if there still is not enough staff allocated, we will be back here having the same conversation again. I wish to highlight the issues in respect of the allocation of staff going forward. The families with whom I have been dealing will be disheartened they will not be getting the service until next year but they would prefer honest engagement in respect of the fact they will not be receiving it until then. We need to consider supporting families who need help to get the private interventions they desperately need. Those private interventions cannot wait.