Mr. Damien McCallion:

I will be brief and Dr. Ní Bhriain may want to come in as well. The national access policy was about consolidating that access point for a child. Effectively, many children have needs in primary care. They may have a disability and may also have a mental health condition. Sometimes, the challenges lie in the interface points between the teams. Certainly, that is the case from teams I have met.

One of the key actions in the child and youth mental health service improvement programme is about working across disability and primary care but also about making sure people are not being moved from one waiting list to another because that is the risk for kids and families. That work is actually going on in an expanding number of areas in the new regions to try to look at that in terms of implementing the national access policy around that, as it is called.

Success is variable. It is contingent on ensuring that teams are aligned in terms of their waiting lists. There is a significant process to go through on that. Ultimately, it is the right thing to do. As for the success of it, it will be contingent on getting those teams working together. I believe it is too early to make an observation as to the challenges. Nothing that has happened so far will change the direction. It makes absolute sense that when a child comes in, they are seen and assessed in a single way that it is cohesive. However, there are challenges. We know there are huge gaps with the teams in disability and, therefore, we are trying to be really careful so that we are not in that process of bouncing people from one list to another.

There is a lot of focus on making that work in a number of sites, beyond the initial sites the Senator referred to. In our actual steering group yesterday, the clinical lead and the executive lead for this programme were talking about the challenges they are facing on the ground. We have a bit to do before we can evaluate it and look at the challenges to progress it. However, the policy and the direction are crystal clear. No one is challenging that. It is about making it work in an environment and in some cases, particularly in disability services, where there are already long lists. It is about trying to work with families in as cohesive a way as we can. We can maybe come back on that in due course.