Mr. Bernard O'Regan:

I will ask my colleagues to comment because they will be able to answer some of the Deputy's questions in more detail. However, I will make some provisional comments about the staffing and some of measures we are taking.

We are currently finalising a census report. It will be available in the next few days. I will send a copy to the committee. The report will contain information on the current levels of staffing of all the teams. By and large, the data shows that there has been a small - and it is small - increase in the number of staff that are now working in the CDNTs. At the same time, we have been fortunate that the Government has provided some additional funding to increase the levels of staffing. While the number of staff employed has increased, the percentage gap has widened a little, although there are more staff working in the service. I will forward that report to the clerk in the next few days once it is finalised.

In respect of measures that have been undertaken for recruitment. A number of things are going on at the moment. We are in the process of an international recruitment campaign. We are working with colleagues to support the clinical placements those staff will need. We will go out to the colleges in the next week or two to try to secure the students who will graduate this September. Work is ongoing between the HSE, the Department of Health and the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth on engaging with the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science and the colleges on increasing capacity of the latter and seeing what can be done about that. We will soon launch a campaign for further recruitment, specifically for disability services. That is in addition to what each of the lead organisations and the different CHOs are doing and they are all actively recruiting as well. Part of the challenge we have in recruitment is that there is a limited pool of people we are looking to draw from, whether it is national or international, and we are also competing internally within the HSE. Speech and language therapists are not only required for disability services. Other parts of the HSE are also looking to draw from that pool so we need to make sure that working in children's services is as attractive as possible while at the same time trying to make the pool of people we can draw from as wide as possible.

Will Ms O'Neill respond about the assessment of needs?