Mary Butler (Waterford, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I know that.

I will ask some of my colleagues to answer some of the questions because some of them are of a clinical nature.

Over the past 18 months child and adolescent mental health services, CAMHS, have been in a spotlight. As the committee will know, we have both a review and an audit under way looking at all 74 CAMHS teams the length and breadth of the country. Between 2021 and 2022, during Covid, referrals to CAMHS increased by 33%, which was absolutely massive. The teams managed to see, in 2022, 21% more referrals than they had ever seen previously while working with the same team. Last year, in 2022, 225,000 appointments were issued to the 2% of children in Ireland who need the support of CAMHS. About 21,000 children, 2% of the child population, need the support of CAMHS.

What I am also doing, as Minister of State, is putting a focus on youth mental health because 2% of children, as I said, need the support of CAMHS. They have moderate to severe mental health difficulties and a lot of complicated issues. Going forward, we also want to talk about youth mental health in general because there is another 98% of the population of young people who would have only emotional distress or mild challenges to their mental health. We are very conscious of that as well. That is why we are partnered with so many organisations, such as MyMind, Jigsaw, SpunOut, Samaritans and Pieta, to support those people.

I will ask Dr. Niazi to speak to Deputy Buckley's question about the pilot because he is all over this. When the two pilots conclude, we will have seven other CHOs, and the next two that will be looked at will be CHO 4, Deputy Buckley's area, Cork and Kerry, and CHO 7. Then we will incrementally roll them out.