Ms Alana Ryan:

I can speak a little about that. It comes back to My Options and really ensuring that from the very first point of access with the service, it is inclusive and designed with diversity of needs in mind. We have a great range of interpretation services being provided through My Options at the moment but there is still additional work which could be done to make sure that it is inclusive of everyone. At the moment, if a person has English as an additional language, that person sometimes requires a friend or family member to call on their behalf. That is one way in which the privacy of the service user is impacted. It might be a particular issue for undocumented people who have English as an additional language. We should be thinking from the very beginning about the additional challenges people on the margins are facing from the very first point of access.

Going back to the points around coverage, if a person is in a rural area that does not have a GP service robustly in place or lives in a direct provision centre and does not have a PPS number yet or, indeed, a medical card, that person will face challenges trying to use public transport to get to a provider. It really speaks to the need to think about the coverage issue very seriously if we are to meet the needs of everyone, particularly those who may have additional barriers to transport as well as language challenges.