Dr. Niall Muldoon:

As I psychologist before I became Ombudsman for Children, I would have seen children being moved into adult facilities when there was a necessity to do so and there was no other option. In my first couple of years as ombudsman, I felt it was okay to keep this option open. However, what is happening now is we have become lazy about it and we have let the idea that we do not have the resources in place rule the fact that the best interest of the child is being overrun. We need to move forward from that. That is why I am asking for a nil or zero option in regard to putting children into adult wards.

We did a report in 2018 titled, Take My Hand, in which we talked to children in those adolescent inpatient units. A number of them talked about the trauma they went through going into adult wards. As the Deputy said, while they were in their lowest ebb in life - they may have been suicidal or already have attempted something - the best service we could offer them was an adult psychiatric ward, which is scary at the best of times. We cannot allow that to happen any more. If we continue with this as it is, we will be legislating it into practice and we will need an amendment in the future to stop it.

At the moment, it is just a practice where people have let themselves go and the habit has built up that we do not have enough beds. That is not an excuse any more, as far as I am concerned. We need to put those resources in place and the only way we can force that to happen is to make it a zero option so people cannot do it. We also have to be aware that even to have children go into paediatric wards is not a positive step forward either, and we need to properly facilitate our children. We had a case in which a child was in a paediatric unit for maybe three or four months, with no therapy, no education and no interaction with anybody except an occasional visit from somebody who wanted to adjust the medication. That is not a way forward either.

We have to look at this in totality. One step forward will be to prevent them going into adult psychiatric units and to make sure we force the resources to be provided and ring-fenced for our children now.