Holly Cairns (Cork South West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I welcome everyone to the committee. I thank them for being here today. While I welcome everything Mr. O'Regan said, we all know the reality faced by children with disabilities and their families is very different.

We heard from Ms Kerrigan, who has an 18 year old daughter. She recalled crying down the phone to the district nurse. Her daughter did not get an assessment until she was 12. It is the job of the committee to impress upon the HSE the urgency and importance of these issues. It is difficult to articulate them, but my personal experience from my constituency office is that, of all the struggles going on in society at present with housing, trolleys and so on, the people I meet who are most at the end of their tether are the parents of children with disabilities who cannot access the help and support their children are entitled to. What is the single biggest measure the HSE can offer to assist families in the provision of the service children are legally entitled to? In a recent discussion at a meeting of the Joint Committee on Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, we heard that 91% of children do not receive their assessments of need within the timeframe prescribed and mandated by law. Will the witnesses elaborate on the current condition of the assessment-of-need process and the extreme waiting times families are enduring? I have repeatedly raised the issue of staffing levels in the CDNTs at meetings of this committee and the joint Committee on Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth. The most recent figures available show that there are still a large number of vacancies in CDNTs. Will the HSE update the committee on how many of the teams are fully staffed and provide a breakdown on the percentage staffing levels of the others? Does the HSE have any proposals on staffing and progressing disability services? This is a massive issue. What is being done differently since the last time we met in order to address this matter? We know the system was not working previously?

Families continuously raise the issue of a lack of contact and meaningful engagement. The family forums were supposed to be an important pillar of progressing disability services. Will the HSE update the committee on the status of the family forums since it last reported in June? I increasingly hear from parents about practices of indirect therapy whereby waiting times for assessments and therapies are so long that therapists are giving parents basic instruction on exercises to complete with their children. While exercises and activities between therapy sessions are an important part of the process - we heard a lot about empowering parents in the previous session - these indirect therapies are a kind of stop-gap before the therapeutic process even begins in many of these cases. Will the HSE comment on the practice and what it says about the children's disability services and how they are working?