Dr. Anne Kehoe:

Absolutely not. There is a huge bottleneck and hundreds and hundreds of applicants across the country. We have five clinical psychology courses, two educational psychology courses and one counselling course. There is a massive bottleneck. The same is mirrored in services for young people and families and adults trying to access interventions at the level of clinical psychologist.

That is not to say that everybody needs to see a clinical psychologist. Many people are very happy with other levels of intervention. However, the number waiting to see clinical psychologists is absolutely shameful. That someone in a moderate to severe mental health presentation has to wait two years to see a clinical psychologist is wholly unacceptable.

We need more funding for all of those training courses, for some of them in the first instance and more for the others, so that we have more professionals trained who can deliver those interventions and supervise other kinds of professions and other disciplines to deliver similar interventions.