Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I acknowledge that more work is being done, but clearly there is increased demand. We have to match that.

On Mr. Reid’s point about communications, I want to move on to the disability side because it is one of the areas I find so frustrating. Let me outline my experience. Young mothers and fathers regularly tell me they have had a chat with their child’s school or preschool provider – it is often at school that this matter is highlighted – and were told there could be a red flag in that their child might be on the autism spectrum or have additional needs. Regularly when these children get an assessment, nobody sits down with the family and explains to them what autism is. Nobody explains to them what the additional needs might be. They get a huge report with a lot of technical vocabulary. People of all educational backgrounds genuinely do not know what it means for their child for the rest of their life. They are put into a genuine state of panic because it is as if they have been presented with a problem although nobody has presented them with the solutions. An initial intervention or meeting linked substantially to the assessment needs to be considered, if only from a service-delivery perspective, to explain what the process ahead is. People often come to me and say they want an intervention because they do not know what the roadmap is. That is not to say we have all the interventions available. I would be interested in hearing the delegates’ comments on the roadmap relating to the Progressing Disability Services for Children and Young People, PDS, programme and where this is going. Many parents are very concerned that we are shifting service delivery on to them. I know the HSE would actually say we are actually giving them the tools to make interventions, but we have to be very careful that we do not have a patronising tone that gives the parents the impression they are being taught how to parent their children. Many parents have said they have experienced this.

It has been reported, in the context of the rapid assessment of needs that many experienced earlier this year, that the hours have eaten up the allocation for this year, meaning there is no allocation to make an intervention this year for a child in this category. This seems like a preposterous suggestion.

On the school inclusion model, whose aim is to have more treatments and therapies available in and to schools, is there ongoing co-operation between the Department of Education and the HSE? This has to be the way forward given the pressures on the community teams in the HSE. There is a commitment to retain the therapists in special schools, which are different from the mainstream schools, but there are many children in mainstream schools that I believe would benefit from the same type of school inclusion model. I appreciate that there is a lot in that.