Dr. Siobh?n N? Bhriain:

There was a great deal of thought put into that at the time. When we were developing the model of care, the information was just emerging about the symptomatology that people had and that is why we set up the long Covid clinics; it was because of the constellation of symptoms that people have. The other thing when we were setting up the neurological clinic is that we tried to be really practical when we set them up so we did not want to put clinics in place that we knew we would not be able to staff. When we went out to set up the clinics, we looked across the board at our numbers of trainees in the system, the people we knew would be eligible for the posts. We tried to ensure that we were going to match those numbers with the clinics we were setting up. As it happened, there is only one neurologist trained in functional neurological disorders at the moment and with that special interest in people who have suffered from post-viral symptoms. Again, this is something that will have to be reviewed from the perspective of training and that of service development.