Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Tuesday, 14 February 2023
Joint Committee On Health
Mental Health Commission Interim Report on CAMHS: HSE
Mr. Damien McCallion:
On the underfunding, clearly we will need to continue to invest. The numbers I gave at the start are numbers we need to continue to invest in youth mental health services. We have focused on CAMHS but we talked at the start about how wider access to primary care psychology is just as important because if people do not get that access they tend to fall into CAMHS. At the moment one of our challenges is to ensure we get recruitment and retention strengthened in order that we can fill the posts we have. There are certain areas where we have funding and that is not the barrier. Clearly, however, we will need more funding over the years in order to fill out the teams, notwithstanding as Mr. Ryan, Dr. Burke and Dr. Niazi said, the need to look at the model in the context of what we have learned. A Vision for Change was written many years ago. It set out a model based on a population of 100,000 to a team and with the sort of scenarios that have been described, that needs to be thought through. It may be, as was mentioned earlier, that it is not the same everywhere for the reasons we talked about. I think there will be more funding and investment needed in a range of areas to strengthen up CAMHS but we also have a challenge to ensure we can get more people through into the team for posts that were funded for and that are vacant. It is more of a multi-year challenge in my view than an immediate challenge in the sense that we need to try to get that pipeline so we can get more people. All of the other work on the IT system, models of care, the hubs and the more specialist areas that have been developed will need funding as well. Clearly, if some of those get real traction, such as the hubs or the specialist teams Dr. Niazi mentioned, that may bring a funding requirement more quickly.
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