Ms Magdalen Rogers:

The average waiting list for a specialist inpatient neurorehabilitation bed in Ireland at the moment is six months. That is for people who are lucky enough to get a bed in the National Rehabilitation Hospital. Once one goes outside Dublin, where consultants are a vital part of that inpatient neurorehabilitation picture, we do not have consultants in rehabilitation medicine in the west, the north west, the mid-west or the midlands. We have one consultant in rehabilitation in Cork who has no dedicated beds so they cannot put patients in a bed and they are transferred to the National Rehabilitation Hospital. We have a severe dearth in the implementation of that part of the strategy. I know that there is much there for the committee members to get their heads around on all of the different elements of the neurorehabilitation strategy. We have seen some progress on the community neurorehabilitation teams but we would call out, in particular, the inpatient post-acute neurorehabilitation beds issue as something on which we are looking for an action plan from the HSE.

If I can pick up on a further important point which my colleague, Ms Cotter, has made, the amount of time people spend in specialist rehabilitation, whether that is in an inpatient bed or in a community neurorehabilitation team, is limited. They still have a lifetime with these conditions and that is where the services provided by our organisations come in. They are already providing long-term community neurorehabilitation services in every community throughout Ireland and it is very important that they are seen as part of the neurorehabilitation strategy and that this aspect of the strategy is also delivered.