Professor Jim Lucey:

There has been incremental progress. The progress that has happened in mental health needs to be celebrated but we need to move forward. We are in the 21st century with a complex and community-based mental health service where the experience within the approved centre is something that almost should not be happening and that is a minority experience for most people with mental health difficulty. What we need, however, is to recognise that when medications of such power are prescribed to children in any county, from Kerry to Donegal, we need to know what is happening as a whole and hold those providers to a standard. We must uplift them and attract them to a service that is good to work in, safe to be in and that they can do good work in.

That cannot be done without the standards because the variance occurs where there is no standard. As a result, workarounds happen, and local difficulties are allowed to extend and so on.