Mr. Mark Smyth:

A HSE pilot project for assistant psychologists was launched by the then Minister of State, Jim Daly, a number of years ago. It was just formalised this year as a specific grade. There are 114 assistant psychologist posts in the HSE.

There are some within the Prison Service and some within the section-38 organisations, but there is still a large cohort who end up having to work for free.

While we greatly value the role of assistant psychologists, we are a little concerned given the experiences of our colleagues in the UK, where the British Government invested a huge amount in assistant psychologists only to find a bottleneck resulted. In other words, assistants remained stuck at assistant level for a number of years. The HSE has addressed this issue by imposing a three-year limit but we want those concerned to progress to training programmes. Assistant psychologists, while they assist with the work, cannot work independently. With regard to setting up an expectation that they will work independently and address all the issues we have, there is a really important adjunct, but we really need to get the individuals onto the training programme. While the pilot programme - with its 114 posts - is good, it is not enough to meet the demand from graduates coming through. Therefore, we hope there will be an expansion. The HSE commissioned research to find evidence as to whether the model worked. It found it did so it set it up as a programme, but 114 will not meet the demand.