Dr. Yvonne Lynch:

I am happy to speak to the Chairman's comments. I will focus on speech and language therapists. There are issues across multidisciplinary teams around accessing supports. I agree that we need more speech and language therapists but we need to address the issue of the moment around retention, keeping people in the public service, having them develop their specialist skills and build their competencies within those roles. We have a lot of movement at the moment and we need to consider why speech and language therapists are not staying in their roles and address those issues rather than always focus on the recruitment piece because otherwise we are not going to get the level of skill and the skill mix we need. We need experienced therapists supporting new graduates and sharing their abilities so those graduates have that supervision and mentoring piece to develop the skills they need. If there is a lot of change, that build-up of expertise will not happen. There has been a reconfiguration of services that means people have moved out of their areas and are working in different areas. We need to give time to address issues and let people build up the skills they need before we look at creating more college places. There is a clinical placement training piece but we will not have that unless therapists are in a position to take on students.