Ms Anne O'Connor:

There are a couple of issues there. First, we should absolutely have people who are qualified for the role, and that applies to anybody undertaking a role. CAMHS is a very specialist service.

In terms of assuring the skills and experience that are relevant to the role, we absolutely have to do that.

This report also throws up for us the following consideration. This is a very difficult one for us and a very difficult one for all of the committee members as well. I refer to the notion that any service is better than no service. We often stretch our services to cover where we do not have the right skills set. Many efforts have been made in this area to recruit. In this case, we have certainly worked on the basis of trying to keep a service going because we felt at the time that was more important than anything. When we look at what happened here, we have to ask ourselves whether having any service is better than having no service and the conclusion in this case is that it probably was not for some of these people. This challenges us in terms of how we configure and deliver our services. Unfortunately, that is not a simple question to answer.