Ms Tara Doheny:

I thank the Deputy for her question on the key challenges. There are always lots of challenges. We were fortunate to have been learning from our demonstration project back from 2008 to 2013. We could see from those initial small grants what worked and what did not work. When we moved into the service reform fund phase, we scaled up the programmes in

terms of looking at the larger institutions and supporting that work. What Genio brought to the table was private funding. We were able to set out in terms of the conditions what we wanted and that was the voice of the service user and bringing improvement to their lives.

When we sat down to look at an invitation for funding to go out to the services, we sat down with the HSE. The two areas that were awarded the most funding were the stakeholder engagement piece and sustainability. In terms of the stakeholder engagement piece, people applying to the fund had to illustrate how they conducted the stakeholder engagement and how they worked within their community healthcare organisation, CHO, or within their service on what people wanted. In terms of sustainability, we could not allow people to move to new living arrangement where they did not have the funding worked out at a local level. This was quite challenging.

This was huge shock to the system for many organisations in terms of having to talk to finance and HR within their own service. We were quite adamant that these were the things that we would not budge on. When the applications for funding came in, there was a grants committee, made up of the funding partners and family members. These applications were scrutinised very heavily and not everybody got funding. We had people calling us to say they did not get funding and that they wanted to be on the list. Some services said they needed to be on the list to be seen to be doing well but our response was that they did not demonstrate how they were doing that through the application process. They also had to detail in their budget what they were going to spend the money on and how many lives were going to be impacted. These were all challenges. The way we overcame them was in terms of the private funding.

We lifted the rock people often do not want to lift around unions and how congregated services can be dismantled. We did this in partnership with the HSE and at all times we had it with us on this journey. There were difficult conversations. Sometimes we had to ask for money to come back because a service was not employing the community connectors to do the piece of work that was agreed on. We had grant conditions and contracts with each of the services. We outlined the conditions and one of these was training where services sent their best and brightest and their champions of change on SSDL training.

What happened very quickly was that two teams developed within the services. The change team was ring-fenced to do the work. This was not an add-on to the everyday job. Everybody was so stressed in their normal day-to-day job so the change teams led out in this new way of working. One could very quickly see the benefits for the individuals.

I refer to the visits. I remember the first visits we went on everybody was almost rolling out the red carpet. It was not meant to be like that. It was more of a support visit in terms of how could we help. From those visits around the country, we could hear that people were all saying the same thing. They had now employed many connectors but they did not know how to support them within their structures. They said they needed training and to be connected to other services.

Pre-Covid, services did day visits to each other to learn from one another. People came in and told their own stories. We started to video some of these and captured the journey of people. It was not all roses. An awful lot of heavy lifting had to be done but it was done in partnership, with the service user at the centre of that.