Mary Butler (Waterford, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for his questions. As he knows, for next year the budget for mental health will be €1.2 billion. Regarding psychiatry of later life, for example, which refers to the care of older people with enduring mental health issues, there is no waiting list in this area at all. Regarding general adult mental health services, the turnaround time is 12 weeks. We do not have to keep waiting lists. People with acute mental health situations will be seen straight away. We have 56 approved centres and departments of psychiatry. The good news coming for next year is that there will be more of a focus on capital expenditure in respect of mental health. We have approximately 16 facilities now that will need capital expenditure and we are putting in place a plan, like we did with the community nursing units throughout the country, to ensure these will be compliant with the findings of the Mental Health Commission.

Regarding the Cherry Orchard facility, it is fantastic. I visited it. There is a school on site and phenomenal work is done there to support children and young adolescents under 18 needing inpatient mental health supports. Many of the young people referred to the facility have eating disorders. They need this specialised care. The situation we had was that due to safe staffing levels, we did not have enough staff to be compliant with the safe staffing model in August. The posts were funded. If memory serves me correctly, we had funding for 60 posts but we only had about 30 nurses in place. We could not have it operating from a safe staffing perspective. We are, however, actively staying on top of it.

Our aim is to reopen every one of those beds. What we did in the short term was we developed more community supports but we also had the support, if we needed it, of a service level agreement with one or two of the private places, if it was required. I keep in touch with that particular CHO about the situation. We have actively tried to recruit the newly qualified psychiatric nurses in the last few months. We have a lot of developments coming onstream across all the CHOs. The purpose of the Sharing the Vision policy is to provide community supports first and foremost, and early intervention is key.

One of the areas where we are challenged is our waiting list for child and adolescent mental health services. We have seen an increase of more than 20% being referred last year and about 2% of children will need these vital supports. We are looking at a waiting list initiative and I am delighted that the Minister is in a position to provide the funding.