Ms Emer Deasy:

I will go back to the point of the connectivity and linking of services. Ms Morrison has outlined it and she walked us through it at the start. There should be joined-up thinking between them. If one care worker were to be appointed to a child and when another service was identified, they should be linked in, rather than going back to the bottom of a waiting list and having to wait for that service. We should be able to get ahead. If we had a more upstream approach to it we could get ahead of a child becoming depressed and getting to the stage where they have suicidal ideation. That is the key thing we as parents are asking for. Any new reforms should not involve the Department of Health but the Department of Education and the training of teachers, caregivers and the area of early childhood care. People have been put into a classroom to teach, and there will invariably be a couple of children there who are neurodiverse, yet those teaching have no training to deal with that. It is inadequate in this day and age. We need to change the narrative around it and the general acceptance of neurodivergent people in our society.