Ms Richelle Flanagan:

I thank the committee for the opportunity to speak. I am a dietitian but I also live with young-onset Parkinson's disease. The neurorehabilitation teams are made up of health professionals such as an occupational therapist, a speech and language therapist, a physiotherapist, a neurorehabilitation consultant and a neuropsychologist, I think. Unfortunately, there is no dietitian as part of that team. That is a gap there in the team. It is important to have multidisciplinary care to keep people as well as possible, as close to their homes as possible.

It is sorely missing for people with neurological conditions. I can obviously speak from the perspective of Parkinson's where there is a huge gap in care. If you look at OECD figures on chronic disease, we are doing well with reducing the number of deaths from diabetes, heart disease and cancer, but we are seeing an increase in the number deaths involving people with neurological conditions. We can tie that back to the fact they are not getting the same multidisciplinary care as the other chronic diseases.