Aisling Dolan (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

As a member of the Joint Sub-Committee on Mental Health, I welcome our guests. I thank the chief operating officer for highlighting that Mr. Fitzgerald took up his role in 2020. I acknowledge the awful findings to emerge from this report. It is important that we have people of experience, including a psychiatrist with an eminent reputation, managing the report that has come out. I hope it will be managed in a swift way because we need to see actions now. I thank Dr. Amanda Burke from CHO 2, which covers counties Galway, Roscommon and Mayo, who is also on the call.

I will pose my questions to Ms O'Connor and Dr. Burke. We in the west are always fighting for investment in our CHOs and primary care services. The challenge in rural areas is that we cannot get multidisciplinary teams because we do not have centres of excellence. When trying to encourage the recruitment of psychiatrists and other high-profile experts in health care, the challenge is that they want to be based in Dublin, Galway or Limerick city centres. How do we get those experts and make change to ensure centres of excellence are spread around regional areas? In that way, we would develop training around multidisciplinary teams that will be in place to support the recruitment of key roles. I believe the challenges with recruitment are one of the real reasons we are seeing the awful impacts on families and children highlighted in this report. This has always been an issue and is currently an issue in the HSE. That is my first question.

Are there ways to streamline the recruitment process to get key people into position quicker when we identify them? When I worked with people in the HSE I learned a great word, which I have mentioned before, namely, "backfill". How do we manage when we cannot put a person into a position because he or she is already in a position somewhere else? This needs to be tackled. I put those questions to Ms O'Connor and Dr. Burke.