Dr. Colm Henry:

I am familiar with one of the established teams in Cork. It is an extraordinary service and they make extraordinary interventions to address an uncommon but very serious mental health difficulty. The team in Cork includes not just a consultant and the nursing staff but also somebody to enable re-entry into careers and the work environment. What they have done is, first, to considerably shorten the time between first presentation and intervention and, second, with the cases they have had to date, they have managed to successfully rehabilitate people through the acute illness, back into the workforce and back into their lives.

As I understand it, we have only two teams. I may supply a note on this. These are big teams that take a long time to build up. They are resource heavy and we want to see these rolled out into other areas because we saw the impact in Cork and elsewhere they have been implemented. There are two stumbling blocks. One is the HSE applying the resources and upscaling it across the country. The second is building the team to its full capacity. With reference to the Deputy's previous question on the community neurorehabilitation teams, half a team is not much good. It takes a while to build up the full team that can have a full impact.