Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy. There is. As we are all aware CAMHS has been under sustained pressure for some time. There are a great number of CAMHS teams throughout the country. They are multidisciplinary teams. There are definitely improvements that must be made. The Deputy will be aware that we have just appointed an assistant national director specifically for CAMHS. There is an assistant national director for mental health. These roles are badly needed. I was speaking to some of the psychiatrists involved and they pointed out that as the lead clinician in their area they work with a multidisciplinary team, quite rightly, but that multidisciplinary team does not actually report to them. It reports to the CHO. If they are the lead psychiatrists on a team and they have other fantastic healthcare professionals working with them, arguably, they should all be part of the same team. There are issues such as this. There are issues with national protocols and guidelines. Essentially the paediatric psychiatrists that we have throughout the country are doing very good work, but neither I nor the Minister of State, Deputy Butler, believe they have had the level of national back-up that they need.

That involves bringing them together for training and learning, ensuring the protocols are in place so that they know where to refer to, and ensuring they have the resources they need. The number of training places in child psychiatry, in the higher specialist training posts, has been increased.

There is probably something of a role for us all here. For reasons we can all understand, the child and adolescent mental health service, CAMHS, has attracted a great deal of negative attention. Some of it is deserved when, for example, we look at what happened in Kerry. This has had a knock-on effect on the number of people training in psychiatry who want to specialise in CAMHS in that it makes it less attractive. Certainly, what has been reported back to me is that while the number of training posts in child psychiatry has been increased this year for the first time in a long time, not all were filled. Part of my job is to ensure those looking at coming into the field of CAMHS and paediatric psychiatry know that we acknowledge there are deficits in support for psychiatrists and that we are very serious about building those supports and putting them in place.

The Deputy has identified that, while a great many very good things are happening across the health service, it is nonetheless not universal. CAMHS is an area where the Minister of State, Deputy Butler, is spending a great amount of her time and is completely dedicated to getting this done, because we need these permanent psychiatry posts filled. The new consultant contract will help with that. Many psychiatrists are on the A contract and it is quite attractive for them to move across to the new contract.