Dr. Amir Niazi:

From a mental health perspective, in the last few years we have given funding to nursing colleges to provide extra spaces for mental health nurse training, and even for doctors. I will give the committee an example. On average, a college used to train three to five CAMHS consultants, but we provided funding for extra spaces last year and 13 to 14 CAMHS consultants were trained. The issue is retention. Most of those consultants did not stay in Ireland, so retention is the challenge we have faced. On the other hand, we have not just been sitting and moaning about this. We have 74 CAMHS teams. What we learned from our experience in County Kerry is that if it is not possible to recruit a consultant for a team, which was one of the biggest reasons for what happened there, we now look at a different model of service delivery, one of a hub and spoke. I refer to combining teams into a hub and at least providing a service from there. From a clinical governance perspective, we are looking at that model now, especially for those areas where recruitment is a bigger challenge, in counties Clare, Donegal and Kerry. In those areas where recruitment is a challenge, we are looking at a different model as well.