Dr. Aideen Hartney:

The Deputy asked about personalised budgets. In the first instance, these would be an enabler of independent living for many people. These would not be for everybody because the exercise of choice and control and the use of a personalised budget come with associated management and administrative tasks that some people would choose to avoid and not take on. This project is very delayed, though. The NDA is represented on the oversight group for the demonstration project, and we have also been asked to evaluate the demonstration projects. To date, we have not been able to get started on that task because the process is so delayed.

Some of the reasons for this include how the project is resourced within the HSE. It simply does not have enough people to manage this process with all those who have expressed an interest in being part of the pilot. There are also other issues. One of them is what I alluded to earlier in respect of the theory that things should be done on a cost-neutral basis. No additional budget was made available for this pilot project and it is very challenging to test approaches to using a personalised budget if people are constrained on the amount of budgeting available to them. This is the issue. People must be in receipt of HSE-funded supports and services to participate in the pilot. Depending on when they came into the HSE system, some people may have a higher or lower budget. When they start the journey of assessing what they would get into their own hands for their own management, it is a sobering realisation for many of them that they would not be able to live independently on a budget that could be unbundled.

While I know Covid-19 and the cyberattack are in the past, those events did have significant impacts on the timeline for this pilot project. Nevertheless, there is a lot of learning out there. As an organisation, therefore, we certainly would be keen to be able to start the evaluation and to start gathering the fruits of this learning and to document it so it can inform the senior decision-makers as to what issues need to be resolved and where they need to be resolved so the next steps could be agreed. We certainly feel the pilot has been going on and on, with not a lot to show for it to date. We would, therefore, be very keen to document this learning so we could move to whatever the next phase might look like.