Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

On this same issue, we have now created another bolt-on aspect to the experiences of the family and the child. The experiences of families of which I am aware, whether we like it or not, reflect a lack of confidence in the service. Families are afraid that they are being sent down yet another road and to another service that they must sign up to get access to services. I am not going to be rhetorical. I just ask the HSE to be mindful of this point and if it can do that, it would be good. We know what the experiences of families are. We all know they are jaded now. Let us take that as a given. We all accept that. If I dovetail the individual family support plan process now with the creation of the CDNTs, then this is again about measurement.

Turning to Ms O'Neill, another parliamentary question I submitted asked "the number of children that have been transferred from Children's Disability Network Team back to primary care on foot of assessments since April 2021, by age, CHO and LHO in tabular form and general categorisation for such a transfer back to primary care operations". Ms O'Neill's response to me stated, "Though there is no specific timeline on when the system will be available, I can confirm that there has been a procurement process and the system is now at the development stage." Again, we do not have a live measurement of the families' experience as they are going through the system. They are again being asked to sign up to a CDNT process and they are wondering how many more arguably bureaucratic processes they will have to go through before they can get access to the speech and language therapist, SLT, the occupational therapist, OT, the psychologist and all the therapy services. Do the witnesses appreciate where I am coming from in this regard? We must ensure that parents and children are minded in this context. The bottom line in all of this is still access to the services, notwithstanding all the issues we are talking about here concerning recruitment, which is, effectively, the big elephant in the room. I just want to hear from witnesses from the HSE that they are going to be careful and mindful of families in this process.