Mr. Adam Harris:

On the recruitment issue, it is clear that there is a cultural aspect involved. It is also clear that the teams that are facing recruitment crises are often those that are under-resourced. In many respects, the clinician becomes the public face of a failing system. That has a huge impact on people's willingness to work there, particularly in the long term.

Another issue, as I understand it, is that there are significant entry-level opportunities, but we are not offering people the pathways that are so critical to ensuring that they remain in the system, particularly as they build up experience. That is where we are losing people. Another area that is important here concerns exposing people to disability when they are still in training. When many people are training, for example, as physiotherapists, they are not actually seeing disability as an attractive place to work or as a place with significant pathways. That definitely needs to be improved. Not only do we need to train more people, but we need to expose people to more opportunities to work in disability while they are studying so that they build up an interest in the area. It is clear that the summer programme could play a role in that. Strategically, it would make a lot of sense to kill two birds with one stone.

Ultimately, we must ensure that in trying to fix this issue we do not drive funding into the private sector as well. That is always a tension. We are increasingly seeing people leave the public sector to work in the private sector. The public sector then begins to collapse further.

A range of measures are required. It is very clearly about pathways, but it is about culture and morale as well. Again, that comes back to resourcing.

On the issue of the summer programme, I am glad the Deputy raised this because it is very important. We all know how difficult it is to get funding for disability. The idea that any of that money would be surrendered back to the Department of Finance is gut-wrenching. There need to be creative ways to look at how that money can get to the end user if they are not able to access the summer programme. If there is any sort of surplus, which I think there will be at the end of the summer – we already raised this matter with the Department – that should be looked at in terms of whether there can be a transition back-to-school programme that could be developed to support people who might find starting in September especially difficult because they have gone two or three months without any support. That is important as well.

We welcome the expansion of the summer programme. It should include as many children as possible. However, there has to be a recognition that those with the highest level of need and those in special schools have been left behind. In next year’s response, there needs to be a targeted approach to make sure that those children are able to access the support they need. The only way of doing that is moving it outside just the Department of Education and bringing in therapy and HSE staff as well.