Professor Jim Lucey:

We often hear about the difficulty of staffing already challenged services and CHOs. What we know about recruitment is that good people want to work in mental health care. In all of the disciplines in all of the colleges we find many people who want to do this type of work, challenging though it is. However, they go to the centres with esteem and that meet standards. They go to the centres that meet the regulations and exceed them in providing quality care. This is an important indication.

While in a way it might simply be a disregard for parity of mental health it is also an organisational and cultural decision by leaders that is a mistake. It leads to a downward spiral of the professional, educational and clinical delivery at the care face, such that we have failed to recruit people who will attract other good people and make good services. The inevitable is what happened and was described well in the Maskey report. It is a very useful indicator of quality services.

The only way we can recommend to address this is to adopt quality standards and make these standards regulatory, measurable and testable. The Mental Health Commission has shown its ability to deliver this in the 1% of service that we do regulate in this way. Such quality standards should be rolled out as quickly as possible and this would have impacts on governance, training, recruitment and esteem. It also flows from the same spring of standards and quality care. It is a resource that is not understood. It is a human resource that makes the difference. The experience of people, whether they are children or adults looking for mental health care, is a human experience of interaction with a person or persons who, as Senator Clonan has said, needs to be able to fly the plane.