Ms Yvonne O'Neill:

The Chairman is right. The speech and language therapy services are particularly challenged. It is one of the areas we would like to target under our own community waiting list initiative and the access to care points that were discussed earlier. We have asked areas to come back with proposals under the waiting list funding to see if there are targeted programmes for speech and language therapy. The constraint around that is getting the therapy time. I should say that we have been successful in some work around psychology services for children, where, between overtime, out-of-hours services and so on, we have taken 1,200 children off the waiting list. We are trying to construct something similar for speech and language therapy but we are more constrained by the available hours. A number of the speech and language therapists are not available and they have other commitments out of hours, and we were not as successful in bringing forward some of the programmes on that. However, it is one of the priorities on our waiting list access plan for community.