Mr. Dharragh Hunt:

I will go back to the point Dr. Tamming made in relation to Part 2 of the Act. It is clear that Part 2 has not worked, at least not for children. I do not think anybody would argue this point. We need to look at how it was designed and how it might work for adults, or how it might work in the future, or if it had been rolled out for adults first. The idea was that a person got an assessment. If that person needed a personal assistant, PA, it would not have been about trying to establish a diagnosis or not. Rather, it would have looked at the person's needs. Then the person would receive a service statement which might not have established entitlement to everything that was in the person's assessment of needs, but would identify the provision the person was going to get and he or she would have a right to that. Then the idea was that a section 13 report was supposed to be produced that would be an aggregate report setting out the shortfall in PA hours across the State. Then organisations like ours and the political system would be very clear on the issue. For example, the data might say that we were down a million PA hours. It then would become a political decision as to whether it would be funded this year or whether the resources would be deployed somewhere else. However, none of that took off, so we do not have the information As Dr. Tamming said, the resources we procured through the ESRI showed that in different areas and different disciplines, there were different approaches to assessments and different definitions of what a PA is. Some places used home support hours as personal assistance hours. There is a lack of clarity as to what is going on.

To return to the Senator's question, the legislation we have is imperfect but a version of it probably could go some way, if there was a standard approach to assessment and identifying the gap that exists. We would then have a process for planning for the future and addressing the shortfall. That was the thinking. It was rolled out for children first and it became this thing about trying to establish a diagnosis. There have been all kinds of issues but possibly there is something in the existing legislation which, with some updating and tweaking, could make it perform the function to which the Senator referred.