Mr. Mark Smyth:

It is 360 just for mental health, and we also had a disability capacity review from Government that looked up to 2032, which estimated a 110% increase in the number of psychologists required just for child disability alone. With regard to children with disabilities, there are significant waiting lists there and there is a huge overlap between children experiencing disabilities plus mental health. We just do not have the staff to do it. We do have staff who are close to experiencing burnout and they are under huge pressure from key performance indicators, KPIs, that relate to the wait time to bums on seats. All they get told is "Do more" and if staff move on it is "Do more with less". Staff on the ground very much feel this pressure to do more. They feel the pressure of the waiting lists and they feel the pressure of the families ringing up. I take five to six phone calls each week from distressed parents who are crying and upset, and we are not able to do it. It is extremely deflating. Reference was made to trying to keep good people in the services but we are failing spectacularly at that. People do not want to work in the services. They go off and they work privately because they are not put under these pressures. There has been talk about workforce planning reviews and we have yet to see the evidence of that. We see individual Departments and individual silos talking about what they need, but as I have mentioned before, they are all competing for the same pool of graduates, rather than thinking how many do we need and how are we going to get them. Those conversations have not started yet.

We are failing a generation of children by not having those conversations. We are also failing staff on the ground who are saying that they cannot cope with this and that they do not want to stay in the system. If we put children with mental health needs or disabilities into a system that is already broken, how is it expected to be able to meet their needs? We are not doing it.

This is not just about funding. As has been said, it is about how we support the staff. Most of us have no continuing professional development, CPD, funding. On the ground, we have seen an exponential increase in the number of children presenting with anorexia over the past two years. That is the condition most likely to kill a child, yet we are expected to do more. There is no individual allocated CPD budget for psychologists, occupational therapists, OTs, or counsellors on the ground, which means we have to figure it out for ourselves or we have to self-fund. We need to do more not just around recruiting but retaining staff. We have a national panel-based system of recruitment that means if somebody spends two years in CAMHS gaining an expertise in youth mental health, and that person wants to progress to the next level, he or she goes onto a generic panel and could end up in adult or disability services. We have systemic failures across the board in how we are recruiting, retraining and looking after our staff. It is not just about the numbers. We do not want to put more people in who have the same experiences the current ones do.