Ms Sarah Hughes:

It goes without saying that across the sector, we need more investment from a financial perspective but it is about more than that if we are talking about really transforming the mental health services. We should look at areas within the higher education sector where things have worked well. We were asked several times about solutions. Where different Departments and agencies come together in a co-operative sense looking to work together and knowledge-share and that kind of thing, that is where things start to come together. Seemingly small changes such as not needing a psychiatrist to be the lead on a multidisciplinary team can be transformative. That is something the Psychological Society of Ireland is working on. Currently, a psychiatrist has to sign off on applications to the DARE scheme to access higher education, so where a young person might have been treated and diagnosed by a psychologist all the way through, he or she must now go back and be added to the waiting list. Something as small as changing that can have a transformative effect, not just for the young people involved but also for the waiting lists and the mental health sector overall. While we obviously need to increase the funding, looking at how we work within the mental health sector could be more transformative.