Mr. Brian Higgins:

By way of update, the recruitment and retention challenge is evident to everyone. Within disability services, we approach it the other way around. We are looking at it as a retention and recruitment challenge. To that end, we convened all of the umbrella bodies for disability services, our HSE colleagues in the areas of operations, stability and sustainability and change and innovation, strategic workforce planning and HR. We will be meeting again tomorrow morning. We will be taking a half day to try to action some of the challenges that exist and that have been identified by our colleagues across the voluntary sector and within the HSE to look at how we can address that. These are around the engagement with colleges on the retention of students and bringing them into the workforce in the Irish context. This is to look at short- medium- and long-term goals in that regard. It is a major challenge.

I thank the Deputy for the comments she made last week. I read the transcript and that will be brought into the conversations tomorrow, as well as potential solutions in the medium and long term. We are very mindful of it. Mr. O'Regan and I will be engaging with our colleagues across the HSE and the voluntary sector. It will be more specifically with a disability focus in this regard. Yet, any learning we can glean can be applied across to mental health as well.